A Dark Comedy Sketch by Jean-Pierre Martinez
One character, male or female, is there. Another arrives.
Two – You’re still here…?
One – Where do you expect me to be?
Two – True, you’re right…
A pause.
One – So we’re being informal now?
Two – I don’t know… Yes… Why not? Were we more formal before?
One – Before what?
Two – Before… Before we stopped being formal…
One – I don’t know… I can’t remember.
Two – Neither can I.
One – Would you rather we stayed formal?
Two – No, no… After all this time we’ve known each other…
One – Of course… (A pause) Actually, I can’t remember… Where did we meet again?
Two – Here, I think.
One – Right…
Two – What?
One – Didn’t we say we’d never been here before? That it was our first time?
Two – Yes…
One – How could we have met here, if we’d never been here before?
Two – Ah yes, you’ve got a point there.
One – Well, yes…
Two – It’s strange. And yet your face did ring a bell.
One – Oh yes…? And what did my face say?
Two – I had the feeling I’d seen you somewhere before.
One – Then we must have met somewhere else.
Two – Yes… (A pause) Somewhere else…?
One – If we didn’t meet here… or anywhere else, then we never met before, did we?
Two – Yes, that makes sense…
One – Which means that, in reality… we don’t know each other?
Two – Yeah…
Silence.
One – So why are we on first-name terms?
Two – Maybe we knew each other… in another life.
One – What do you mean, another life? You only live once, don’t you? Well, I don’t know… That’s what I’ve always been told…
Two – I do have an explanation, but I don’t know whether you’re going to like it.
One – At this point…
Two – If you only live once, if we’ve never met here or anywhere else, and yet we know each other… it means we’re nowhere.
One – And above all, it means we’re dead…
Two – I can’t see any other explanation. Can you?
One – No, neither can I. (A pause) And… what would we have died of, then?
Two – What?
One – Yes, what. We must have died of something, mustn’t we?
Two – So I tell you we’re dead, and the first question that comes into your head is what we died of?
One – There’s no need to be unpleasant… I’m starting to wonder whether we shouldn’t go back to being formal after all.
Two – I don’t know… There are lots of ways to die… but the result is the same, isn’t it?
One – Yes, that’s not wrong…
A pause.
Two – The question is whether we’re in heaven or in hell.
One – We must be in hell.
Two – Why?
One – It’s very hot, isn’t it?
Two – Yeah, now I understand the expression “you’ll burn in hell”.
One – In heaven, they must have air conditioning. And besides… in heaven, shouldn’t we be alone?
Two – Alone? You mean in solitary confinement?
One – True, in prison it’s to punish difficult inmates that they put them in solitary.
Two – So why do you say that in heaven we should be alone?
One – Wasn’t it Sartre who said: “Hell is other people”?
Two – Sartre? Yes, maybe…
One – If hell is other people, then in heaven you must be alone, right?
Two – That would be logical, anyway.
A pause.
One – We remember nothing. Why do I remember Sartre?
Two – And Nietzsche.
One – Do you remember anything?
Two – I don’t know… I remember… that it was already hot.
One – Hot?
Two – Very hot.
One – But hot… like here?
Two – Yes, that’s it… Like hell. But on Earth.
One – So that’s how we died…?
Two – How?
One – Heatstroke. It happens.
Two – Yes… Maybe we’d gone hiking in the desert, without water, and died of thirst.
One – Or maybe we all died.
Two – All of us? The end of the world, you mean?
One – The end of Humanity, at any rate.
Two – Then why are there only two of us?
One – Maybe we were the last two.
Two – Maybe… Just as Adam and Eve were the first two.
One – What’s certain is that here, it doesn’t exactly look like the Garden of Eden.
Two – No… It looks more like…
One – Nothing.
Two – Yeah.
One – I remember too. It was very hot.
Two – Every year, it was a little hotter.
One – All the trees died.
Two – The Earth became a desert.
One – We had no water left.
Two – We ended up dying of thirst.
A pause.
One – But then… are we in hell, or are we still on Earth?
Two – What difference does it make?
One – You’re right… What’s the point of hell, when we managed to turn the Earth into a furnace?
A pause.
Two – It’s strange, though…
One – What?
Two – Are you thirsty?
One – No.
Two – Neither am I.
One – It seems that when you’re dead, you’re no longer thirsty.
Two – There has to be some advantage to being dead. (A pause) We’re no longer thirsty… but we’re still just as hot.
One – Which goes to show you shouldn’t always trust popular expressions.
Two – What expression?
One – To ice someone. Meaning to kill them.
Two – Yeah… All of Humanity has been iced. And yet we’re still just as hot.
One – We are very little indeed.
Two – That reminds me of the story of the frog that wanted to be as big as the ox.
One – And swelled up so much that it burst.
Two – Or those financial bubbles people used to talk about on the stock market. Humanity was living in a bubble, and in the end it burst.
One – Which goes to show that philosophers talk a lot of rubbish too.
Two – Philosophers?
One – Nietzsche, about soap bubbles supposedly knowing more than anyone else about happiness.
Two – Yeah. All of Humanity was a soap bubble.
One – And in the end it burst.
Two – Pop… And there you are. Nothing left.
One – Until the next bubble.
Two – Which will burst in turn long before it reaches the stars.
One – Yes, we are soap bubbles.
Two – But who blows the bubbles…?
The first character starts blowing bubbles again, as at the beginning.
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A sketch from the collection Apocalypse
Link to the collection for free download (PDF)
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https://jeanpierremartinez.net