Absurdist fiction in the context of "Robert Sheckley"

Riget (English title: The Kingdom) is a Danish absurdist supernatural horror miniseries trilogy created by Lars von Trier and Tómas Gislason. Set in the neurosurgical ward of Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet (lit. 'The National Hospital', nicknamed "Riget", lit. 'the realm' or 'the kingdom'), each episode of the show follows the hospital's eccentric staff and patients as they encounter bizarre and sometimes supernatural phenomena. The series is notable for its wry humor, its muted sepia colour scheme, and the appearance of a chorus of dishwashers with Down syndrome, who discuss in intimate detail the strange occurrences in the hospital. The main theme's song was written by von Trier himself.

The first series of four episodes premiered from DR in November to December 1994, and was followed by a second series, Riget II, which aired in November 1997. A belated third and final series of five episodes, directed by von Trier and written by von Trier with Niels Vørsel, entitled Exodus, began filming in 2021 and was screened out of competition at the Venice Film Festival and at the Serial Killer festival in September 2022, and premiered on Nordic streaming platform Viaplay with the first two episodes on 9 October. The series premiered in select regions between 27 November and 25 December on streaming platform MUBI.

2 + 2 = 5 or two plus two equals five is a mathematical falsehood which is used as an example of a simple logical error that is obvious to anyone familiar with basic arithmetic.

The phrase has been used in various contexts since 1728, and is best known from the 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.

The theatre of the absurd (French: théâtre de l'absurde [teɑtʁ(ə) də lapsyʁd]) is a post–World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s. It is also a term for the style of theatre the plays represent. The plays focus largely on ideas of existentialism and express what happens when human existence lacks meaning or purpose and communication breaks down. The structure of the plays is typically a round shape, with the finishing point the same as the starting point. Logical construction and argument give way to irrational and illogical speech and to the ultimate conclusion—silence.

Endgame is an absurdist, tragicomic one-act play by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. First performed in London in 1957, it is about a blind, paralysed, domineering elderly man, his geriatric parents, and his servile companion in an abandoned house in a fictional post-apocalyptic wasteland, all of whom await an unspecified "end". Much of the play's content consists of terse, back and forth dialogue between the characters reminiscent of bantering, along with trivial stage actions. The plot is also supplanted by the development of a grotesque story-within-a-story that the character Hamm is relating. The play's title refers to chess and frames the characters as acting out a losing battle with each other or their fate.

Originally written in French (entitled Fin de partie), the play was translated into English by Beckett himself and first performed on 3 April 1957 at the Royal Court Theatre in London in a French-language production. It is usually considered among Beckett's most notable works. The literary critic Harold Bloom called it the most original work of literature of the 20th century, saying that "[Other dramatists of the time] have no Endgame; to find a drama of its reverberatory power, you have to return to Ibsen." Beckett considered it his masterpiece and saw it as the most aesthetically perfect, compact representation of his artistic views on human existence, and refers to it when speaking autobiographically through Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape when he mentions he had "already written the masterpiece"..