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Reader question: Please explain this sentence, particularly “theater of the absurd”: “America has the best health care system in the world” — a claim that moves us right into the theater of the absurd. My comments: The speaker means to say that the assertion (that America has the best health care system in the world) is absurd, that such a claim doesn’t belong to the realm of the reality but the realm of theater, particularly of the absurd, illogical, fanciful, and ridiculous, etc. “Theater of the absurd”, you see, originally refers to theater plays about the absurdities of life, its unreasonableness, meaningless and so forth. “Critic Martin Esslin coined the term in his 1960 essay ‘Theatre of the Absurd’”, according to Wikipedia. “He related these plays based on a broad theme of the Absurd, similar to the way Albert Camus uses the term in his 1942 essay, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’.” Never mind Camus and other particulars for the moment, in everyday parley, if someone says something is in the theater of the absurd, they just mean to say it’s absurd. Well, you don’t find a lot of people using “theater of the absurd” in everyday conversation, of course, and that’s the thing. It’s a term reserved for formal occasions only and only used by people who are well versed in art and are learned in general – or if they want to sound learned. | 
