The Haughty Diner: An Absurdist Piece on Our Times

My wife and I were dining, last weekend, at a peaceful, suburban restaurant when an interesting incident occurred.

A swarthy, corpulent man strode in with the swagger and nonchalance of a queen pig arriving at the royal pigsty. He was wearing loose, green trousers and a purple bush-shirt. He and his family seated themselves at the table adjacent to ours. The man's bottom overflowed out of the seat, like cotton-bales bulging out of overstuffed, roofless trucks on Indian highways. After a brief discussion amongst themselves, they ordered some soup and unpronounceable starters. The thingamajig's exaggerated gestures kept catching my attention all the while.

When the soup arrived and was being served, the waiter's hands trembled a trifle too much and some liquid spilled on the table cloth. The beast screamed at the waiter, "Don't you know how to serve soup? you bloody anti-national!" The words rang like gunshots in an abandoned monument! Diners at every other table in the restaurant swivelled their heads round the axes of their necks, fixed their gaze on this pestilence and inspected him with disdain and bemusement, behaving as would have the members of British gentry upon discovering Gunga Din dining in their midst at an upscale restaurant in London! The waiter, whose face had turned mauve with shame, muttered a few incoherent words of apology and withdrew, staggering, to the cloak room - after all, neither the maître d’ nor any of the patrons, including me, had come to the hapless waiter's defence! But the uncouth man, blissfully unmindful of everything, simply stayed focused on the task at hand - 'slurp! slurp!.... munch! munch!.... burp! burp!... fart! fart!'

Thankfully, we had reached the end of what was otherwise a wonderful dinner. In a short while we exited the restaurant, thereby sparing ourselves any further horrors.

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Disclaimer: The above story is entirely a piece of fiction. Resemblance to any person or incident is mere happenstance.

What is absurdist humour?

Wikipedia defines surreal or absurdist humour as: a form of humour predicated on deliberate violations of causal reasoning, producing events and behaviours that are obviously illogical. Constructions of surreal humour tend to involve bizarre juxtapositions, non-sequiturs, irrational or absurd situations and expressions of nonsense.