Francis is an Argentine, and brings a sense of the region and, presumably, of the sad absurdities of the American-Cuban drama.
What binds it all together so impressively is O'Flynn's emotional articulacy, which captures life's sad, strange absurdities and glosses them with a kind of nobility.
Taped in his studio, with the artist repeating the title phrase, Mr. Baldessari comes across as a Beckett absurdity: a funny-sad creature born to make art, but adrift in a transitional age.
By the end of the evening, the four diners agree that comedy and tragedy are not mutually exclusive — on the contrary, the most enjoyable moments in life may be shadowed by pain, the saddest by an aura of absurdity.
There is a visceral absurdity about the wall, and it is sad how it divides and isolates two people who, we may imagine, might otherwise productively commune and collaborate.
Though they know they have destroyed each other, and their children, they have moments of strange, sad bonding, when they fall into ragged laughter at the familiar, inescapable absurdity of it all.
The absurdity of the gesture is amusing and yet somehow a little sad (Johnson).
David Schwimmer's Robert Kardashian, a shaky proposition early on, continues his development into a sad-sack proxy for the audience, fazed into silence, and then exhausted retreat, by the absurdity of the outcome.
Poignancy as well as absurdity shows up in the home appliance aisles; surely there are few things sadder than the warming drawer, a favored feature in so many ordinary stoves for ordinary families of the early 21st century.
