If a bear has ennui in the forest and there is no one around to tell, is it really in despair?

"You betrayed the proletariat cause!"
"No, YOU betrayed the proletariat cause!"
"You"
"You"
"Stop copying me!"
"Stop copying me."

The Hague Congress of 1872 was a congress of the International Workingmen's Association, held one year after the Paris Comune collapsed. Karl Marx wanted the proletariat to take control of the state apparatus next time, so the revolution could defend itself. Mikhail Bakunin accused Marx of authoritarianism, and the conflict drove a wedge between the Marxists and the Anarchists.

"Hey Sartre. Sartre. Why did the chicken have a self-nihilating nothingness that haunted the core of its being? To get to the other side!"

"Hell is other people" is the famous line from Sartre's play "No Exit". The characters in the play were literally in hell, and their only punishment was to be stuck in a small room with each other forever. For Sartre, it doesn't really mean that other people suck, or are annoying, but to live under their contant gaze for eternity would be hell. Sort of like how Dostoyevsky spent five years in a Prison Camp in Siberia, and said the worst part of the whole thing was that he never had even a single moment alone the entire time. Actually, maybe that's where Sartre got the idea, so maybe Dostoyevsky is Sartre's muse. A lot of his books are kind of just French retellings of Dostoyevky's very Russian novels. They drink wine instead of vodka. They have ennui instead of murder people. That kind of thing.
Merleau-Ponty was a French Phenomenologist who was in the friend circle with Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus. He was sort of the dork of the group, who would tell dad jokes and stuff like that. I don't really have any hard evidence for that, but you can kind of tell from his face.

The good looking guy won.

Modern French philosophers, especially Post-Structuralists like Derrida, are often accused of writing in an overly obscure and elitist manner. The passage from the contestant is from Derrida himself, but I had to look around a lot to find something that obscure sounding, most of it is much more readable (although I don't want to exaggerate, Derrida is a very difficult philosopher to read). Also, it probably says something that the one difficult passage I found was about Hegel. If you are interested in Derrida and what his idea's actually are, Rick Roderick does a pretty good job explaining it, and dispelling some of the common myths.
Lacan was kind of like the French Freud, it's all about subconscious penises and stuff.