The crucifixion and the fair percentage - one of the Calvary thieves was saved

Samuel Beckett was an artist with some commentators would deem to be a  jaundiced vision of human existence that he managed to be born not only on Friday the 13th, but on one that coincided with Good Friday. Later, he would allude to the day of Christ's death in an immortal quip in Waiting for Godot: "One of the [Calvary] thieves was saved. It's a reasonable percentage." 

  if Beckett had said something of a similar irreverent nature of 'another' religion would he be today imprisoned or have a price on his head, even though some commentators equally sacrilegious view the Crucifixion as exemplar of sado masochism

Are you English he was once asked 'Au contraire' he replied.  

Beckett was literature's  most lovable pessimist his writing awash with talk of the timeless human condition portrayed in his work.

Beckett is a voice from the wreckage of politics 
his refusal of all forms of des nos jours type certainty for in writing there is the absence of certainty, his ascetic refusal of all forms of belonging a voice that does not need political forms of identification to clothe it he transports us into the thin blue air of unadorned  aesthetics, even as some have argued that apolitical is in sone way political
What really draws one to Beckett is the cultural withdrawn  or displaced neutrality resigned indifference of his work. The cultural displaced the apolitical can only sit and wait the placenesness of his writing which barely sees to refer  to the world at all
 Beckett is often hailed as the epitome of the ahistorical  His work has been characterized by a poetics of 'impotence that makes use of  silence, indifference, resistance to narrative and a disconnection from contextual time and space. 

His work is full of aporias expression of doubt,  irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory.

Throughout his life and career, Beckett encountered an exceptional range of extreme political ideologies in Twentieth Century Europe. His background as an Anglo-Irish Protestant in the Irish Saorstat, his documented wandering through Nazi Germany in 1936-37, his decision to leave neutral Ireland during World War Two and subsequent role in the French Resistance, his encounters with Irish and British censorship throughout his career, and his support of political causes throughout his writing life such as anti-apartheid in South Africa and the imprisonment of Václav Havel all suggest that the politics of Beckett’s biography and writing is a ripe area for discussion.

 The Irish, unlike their erstwhile colonial proprietors, have always been a cosmopolitan nation, from the nomadic monks of the Middle Ages to the corporate executives of the Celtic Tiger. If the oppressiveness of colonial rule turned some of them into nationalists, it turned others into citizens of the world. Joyce, Synge, Beckett men already caught between two or three cultures and languages, were to flourish in the rootless, polyglot, ambience of high-modernist Europe, rather as half a century later their compatriots were to embrace the European Union. It helped, in signing up to a linguistically self-conscious modernism, to stem from a nation in which language, as a political minefield, could never be taken for granted.