Conspicuously absent

My husband, as you may know, is not such a fan of social interaction. Or leaving the house. Or really anything involving other human beings. So it's no wonder that some folks accuse him of being a figment of my imagination.
My husband's an example of an unseen character, and such characters abound on stage and screen.
There's Godot, of course, the never-seen subject of the play Waiting for Godot. I managed to major in theater and then later in English without reading, or being assigned to read this play, so I'm taking that as a sign. I did, however, see Christopher Guest's Waiting for Guffman, though, which my gut tells me is probably just as good.

One real-life Godot is street artist and subtlety eschewer Banksy.

Girl seized by an ATM, attributed to Banksy,
Rosebery Avenue, London. Photo: Bengt Oberger

Banksy has, at various times, claimed that he remains anonymous because graffiti is illegal, because "the art world is the biggest joke going," and has said of his work that he can't believe the morons who would pay money for-- hang on a sec - George Lucas, is that you?

Lucas hates this, but is sure the fans will love it.

Returning to the land of make-believe, television's littered with women who aren't there. On Cheers, Norm's wife Vera was the subject of many jokes, but was never seen. Niles' wife Maris on Frasier was perpetually just out of frame. Colombo's wife rounds out the Missing Spouses Club. In one episode, Columbo's wife couldn't attend a social event because she was under the weather. In another, she was caring for her skateboarding mother. The closest we ever come to meeting her is a 1991 episode in which "she was here a minute ago." 
In cartoons, adults are often conspicuously absent, like the parents in most of the Charlie Brown cartoons. The humans in the Tom and Jerry cartoons are only shown from behind, I'm assuming because their psychotic pets ripped their faces off in an effort to murder one another. But perhaps most disturbing of all is Nanny from The Muppet Babies. We only see Nanny from her stripe-stocking-clad knees down, and only in a few episodes. And you have to wonder, how did she come to be in charge of all those Muppets? Surely she didn't give birth to them all, leading one to wonder where in the hell she got them. And why would she adopt a litter of puppet people only to leave them all unattended for hours at a time in a giant nursery that inexplicably had only two cribs? And why weren't we allowed to see her face, exactly? The eighties were troubling times.

If you think this is terribly done
you should see what it
looked like when I tried
to shop his head onto her body.