Latest news with #absurdity
Irish Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4: Fun and refreshingly anarchic, but more valiant revolt than workplace revolution
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 Peacock stage, Abbey Theatre, Dublin ★★★☆☆ Set in the sterile, fluorescent-lit vacuum that is the office of an anonymous Irish fund-management firm, The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 is a new play by Caitríona Daly that explores the absurdity of corporate life with humour and chaos. Ronán Duffy's design perfectly captures that nowhere aesthetic: cool-toned, clean and soulless. The details are crushingly well observed: unopened water bottles, swivel chairs and token charity teddy bears. Three employees are locked in Conference Room 4 during lunch to decide how to spend the company's annual corporate social-responsibility budget. Ambitious Clodagh (Caoimhe O'Malley) and rural outsider Daniel (Fionn Foley) are unexpectedly joined by Jess (Emma Dargan-Reid), a new receptionist pulled in under the false pretence of a team-building exercise. What unfolds in Raymond Keane's production is a descent into role-play and theatrical mayhem as they audition proposals, from saving the bees to sponsoring a GAA club in Offaly, in a half-baked gameshow-style competition. Meanwhile, a frenzied HR rep, Susan (Helen Norton), makes comic attempts to regain control. The play skewers the hollowness of corporate ethics, presenting them as less about morality than about optics. When Jess suggests directing funds toward more urgent causes – medical aid for Gaza, domestic-abuse services, poverty relief – she's met with deflection. Clodagh briskly explains that the company has a Tel Aviv office, the chief executive has an abuse conviction and giving money to poor people would draw too much media scrutiny. READ MORE The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4: Fionn Foley, Emma Dargan-Reid and Caoimhe O'Malley. Photograph: Rich Davenport The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4: Emma Dargan-Reid as Jess. Photograph: Rich Davenport The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4: Fionn Foley as Daniel. Photograph: Rich Davenport At this point, Jess, depicted as a caricature of a left-wing millennial, erupts in unconvincing rage. Even if she didn't know the specifics of the company's shady dealings, her shock feels disingenuous. We live in a world where corporate evil is no longer surprising but regarded with quiet, beaten-down apathy and irony. A more compelling play might have explored why the real-life Jess might have known all this and taken the job anyway. Our collective resignation, not outrage, is the more urgent moral dilemma. The play's structure, alternating wild improvisation with moments of emotional honesty, is both its strength and its flaw. There's real energy in the madness: Daniel dons a princess dress and peroxide wig to play a Trump-supporting southern belle named Tiffany; Clodagh transforms into a brittle talkshow host in sunglasses and a feather boa. There's military cosplay, Mario Kart references and layers of silliness. None of it needs to make sense: it's driven by the Bacchic release of characters seeking escape from soul-crushing monotony. The performances are uniformly strong, and the sense of play is genuine. Still, the production's loose form eventually undercuts its themes. It builds to a climax that offers no explanations, only an unnecessary burst of metatheatre and a choreographed dance to Tame Impala. Why Tame Impala? A giddy embrace of the meaninglessness we now inhabit? It borders on the hysterical, a distraction from the questions the play raises but can't resolve. The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 is fun and refreshingly anarchic. But its wildness, its best and most unusual quality, is also its undoing. A valiant, messy, entertaining lunchtime revolt, but not a revolution. The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 is at the Abbey Theatre , Dublin, until Saturday, September 6th
The Guardian
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Kathy Maniura: ‘I've played a paper straw, a nervous smoke alarm and now a middle-aged cycling man'
Why did you get into comedy?I've always loved making people laugh. I was raised on a diet of sketch shows (French and Saunders, Mitchell and Webb, Monty Python) and took any opportunity I could to be silly for an audience. I have a vivid memory of a very elaborate performance of We Three Kings for the Year 5 talent show ('sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, DYING!') – I won. I'm drawn to big, playful characters – wigs, costumes, silly voices. At uni I started doing sketch comedy and never really stopped. How would you describe what you do?Gentle absurdity. It's a silly good-natured sending up of recognisable things. In my last show, I brought to life a series of inanimate objects – including an annoying Californian paper straw, a pathetic electric scooter desperate to be unlocked, and an incredibly anxious, sensitive smoke alarm. My new hour merges this kind of absurd character comedy with drag. I'm pretending to be a middle-aged cycling man, complete with Lycra bulges, devastating divorce, outrageous income and zero emotional intelligence. What inspired the show?I used to cycle to work through central London, wearing jeans like a normal person, and I'd be overtaken by these guys all kitted out in the gear and I would just think to myself … surely, surely they cannot be cycling much further than me. Where are they going? From their central London flat to their slightly more central London office? Why won't they put their feet down at the traffic lights? Are they OK? Around a similar time, I became aware of drag kings as an art form (like drag queens, but performing heightened masculinity instead). I was so energised, inspired and amazed watching the iconic drag king collective Pecs and the Man Up! competition. It's such an exciting, varied, DIY, punky art form and I started to wonder if I had a drag king character in me. The two ideas combined, and The Cycling Man was born … What's been one of your all-time favourite gigs?Sometimes the weird gigs are the most unexpectedly fun. Last summer I did a spot at a small festival. I was with some brilliant comedians (Rosalie Minnitt, Lorna Rose Treen and Emily Bampton). We turned up and the person on the stage before us was giving a very earnest presentation about his research into arctic foxes. Getting into drag in the cold backstage area of the tent listening to the lecture I thought, ah – they may not be in the mood for absurd character comedy after this. How wrong I was! The audience were wonderful, and all the more wonderful for defying our expectations. That's a pro and con of the job – you never know quite what you're going to get until you turn up for a show. Can you recall a gig so bad, it's now funny?When I was doing a show with my comedy partner Derek Mitchell, we booked a spot at one of the stages on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. It's the main flyering thoroughfare during the fringe and there's an open-air stage for acts to perform a snippet of their show. Lovely, in theory. Except what does well on that stage is juggling and a cappella singing, not alternative sketch comedy. I performed a solo piece – a wordy parody song. It was raining. The small crowd quickly dispersed. Derek laughed his head off as the light left my eyes while I continued to perform. There were two other people watching under an umbrella – my parents. Any bugbears from the world of comedy?There's still a lot of unpaid and poorly paid gigs, many of which you travel for and, while the Edinburgh fringe itself is still seen as a rite of passage, it's becoming prohibitively expensive. Many working-class comedians can't do it. A lot of comedy spaces are inaccessible in other ways – male dominated, all white, in basements or upstairs in old pubs. It puts comedians in marginalised groups at a huge disadvantage in an industry that's already hard work. Worst advice you've ever been given?A prospective agent once said to me that if you have a day job you like, you're a 'hobbyist'. Actually, creative work doesn't have to be torture, and I think the idea that creative brilliance is born of hardship and that you have to give up everything to pursue your dreams is actually pretty toxic. That person did not become my agent! What's an important lesson you've learned from being a standup?To try and fail! The only way you get better at comedy is by saying a joke out loud, in front of people, and seeing what happens. Once you've bombed a decent number of times, you learn that dying doesn't actually mean dying. Kathy Maniura: The Cycling Man is at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, 30 July-24 August
CNN
12-07-2025
- Politics
- CNN
The checkbox question
Atlantic staff writer Thomas Chatterton Williams joins Michael Smerconish to discuss his latest piece called "Zohran Mamdani reveals the absurdity of affirmative action."
CNN
12-07-2025
- Politics
- CNN
The checkbox question
Atlantic staff writer Thomas Chatterton Williams joins Michael Smerconish to discuss his latest piece called "Zohran Mamdani reveals the absurdity of affirmative action."
Irish Times
30-06-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Read the headlines and wonder if everyone is on Ozempic and has ADHD? It's all a bit overwhelming
You already know that absurdity is embedded in our digital world, and yet the constant bombardment confirming as much can be utterly overwhelming. You're endlessly overloaded by conflicting information and opinions. You scroll through news of ecological disaster , war, political failure and economic instability. Then you get an ad for protein yoghurt and an artificial intelligence clip of someone telling you to quit your job and follow your dreams when the average Dublin rent is almost €2,500. Also, there's something fluttering in the back of your mind about who has nuclear weapons and who doesn't. You wonder if you should take the weight loss drug everyone is talking about, except what about that comment you saw on Instagram saying, 'my cousin is a podiatrist and said it makes your feet fall off'? You read headlines and wonder if everyone is getting a facelift and an ADHD diagnosis – it's starting to feel like it – and it all feels absurd. It is absurd – this sense of rudderless, directionless urgency strips our experience of meaning. After watching a terrifying 30-second video about muscle loss and ageing, you order some protein yoghurt. Human beings are meaning-oriented creatures. We don't do well without a sense of 'why'. Why we should get up in the morning. Why we should do the necessary things we'd rather not do. Why our lives and choices, as well as those of other people, matter. Meaning fuels us through difficulty, contextualises life's inevitable suffering and gives us a sense of fulfilment in our own effort. It prevents us from feeling that we could be replaced by an actor who looks kind of like us without anyone noticing. Without meaning – Aristotle calls it telos – the wheels fall off. A sense of meaninglessness is central to feeling clinically depressed, so while it might seem like an abstract and theoretical problem – a fruity, modern malaise – it really isn't. We are experiencing a collective crisis of meaning; the grand narratives we once bought into, and which connected us through shared belief, are no longer cutting it. This is the postmodern reality, and it's a lot of dancing tweens on TikTok and billionaires on testosterone building space shuttles and men past or pushing 80 (and who do or do not have nuclear weapons) sabre rattling on social media. It's a lot of total absurdity without a lot of meaning. READ MORE Logotherapy – the creation of Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl – is unsurprisingly seeing a resurgence lately, given our thirst for meaning. Frankl outlined it most famously in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning, where he introduces the 'therapeutic doctrine' he formulated. It's a form of psychotherapy that places pursuit of meaning at the centre of life. We can cope with pretty much anything, Frankl suggests (any 'how'), if we can find meaning in it (if we have a 'why'). Meaning is not given to us from outside, he says, and it can come in many forms. Like the existentialists, Frankl thought that meaning is something we create for ourselves rather than something awaiting us out in the world. Especially when we're struggling, Frankl suggests, we need a reason to navigate our way through whatever life is demanding of us. He's not about endless rumination and self-examination, though, and in an age of tedious self-optimisation and hyper-therapised narcissism, it's little wonder that people are reconnecting with Frankl's suggestion that we consider one question above any other: 'What is life asking of [me]?' [ How absurd: the world as Albert Camus saw it Opens in new window ] French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus is another thinker who spent most of his career on questions of meaning, but he went another way with it. It makes sense that the destruction and narrative chaos of the second World War spurred these sorts of questions. It was Camus who brought the concept of absurdism into the mainstream. Unlike Frankl and people such as Jean-Paul Sartre , who agreed that there is no objective meaning to life but suggested that we create it, Camus rejected meaning altogether. Our great cause of suffering, he suggested, is our deep desire for meaning, clarity and a sense of purpose in a universe that has no inherent meaning. It offers us no answers. This is the absurdity, Camus says, our primordial desire to make sense of a senseless universe. The absurdity is not about the world being nonsensical, but about its inherent and unresolved contradiction. In our constant desire to make sense of the mayhem. [ We like to romanticise Ireland's past, but too much remembering could be bad for us Opens in new window ] We can make meaning, Frankl says, we can find it, as others suggest, or we can revolt, as Camus would put it. His approach is not about giving in to despair or becoming cynical or turning into the worst Facebook comments section troll you can imagine. It's about permitting the contradiction without trying to resolve it – looking right at the absurdity rather than away from it and being all right with it. We can't make sense of what's going on around us, but we can decide what we think about meaning, and what we're going to do with it.
