absurdity

Introduction

A psychiatrist who has a 30-minute appointment with a patient, needs another 20-25 minutes to process all paperwork attached to the meeting (Spaans, 2017). There is now so much bureaucracy involved in health care provision, that the time that health care providers spend on their actual jobs is substantially reduced, seriously impeding the quality of care because of the very procedures meant to ensure quality of care.

Introduction

There is a scene in Molloy, the first novel of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist trilogy, in which Molloy, an elderly homeless drunk, wanders a pebbled beach collecting ‘sucking stones’. The problem for Molloy, to which Beckett dedicates one paragraph over five pages, is how to distribute his sucking stones amongst his four pockets such that he sucks each stone in turn while rotating them round his four pockets thus avoiding the ‘diabolical hazard’ of ‘only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about’ (Beckett, 1955: 70).

Introduction*

I think humor is like electricity. You work with it but you don’t understand how it works. It’s an enigma. (Lynch in Murray, 1992/2009: 144)