A Comedy Sketch About Catastrophe and Human Behaviour by Jean-Pierre Martinez
Lights up.
One character is there, male or female. Another arrives.
Two – It’s hot, isn’t it?
One – Yes… Every year, it’s a little hotter than the year before.
Two – And for a little longer.
One – At first, it was just a few days.
Two – A week at most.
One – We called it an episode.
Two – Yes. A heatwave episode.
One – Now it’s no longer an episode, we get the whole season.
Two – And the seasons keep coming, with more and more episodes.
One – Like on Netflix.
Two – Now it’s more than six months a year.
One – Soon we’ll be talking about a cool spell from time to time.
Two – Like an ad break before the series continues.
One – How could we let this happen without reacting…?
Two – Because we’ve always put the short term before the long term.
One – Yes. The unemployment rate or the price of petrol before the survival of Humanity.
Two – Half a degree more every year doesn’t sound like much.
One – But after ten years, that’s five degrees.
Two – And after half a century, that’s twenty-five degrees.
One – And twenty-five degrees is a lot.
Two – Far too much.
One – Can we still stop this infernal machine?
Two – Until now, all we’ve done is try to minimise the symptoms, without really tackling the causes of the disease.
One – And now it’s too late.
Two – In any case, that’s what we’re told.
One – The people telling us that are sitting comfortably at home, by the swimming pool.
Two – Or indoors, with the air conditioning.
One – Their air conditioning, which dumps its heat outside. Where we are condemned to live, if only to go to work or do the shopping.
Two – We do have to fill the fridge.
One – It’s crazy, when you think about it. All the crap they sell us, we keep nicely chilled in a refrigerator, while we are literally dying of heat in our rabbit hutches.
Two – At least when we’re dead, they put us in a cold room.
One – Until it’s time to incinerate us… Releasing even more carbon into the atmosphere.
Two – Yes, but what can we do about it?
One – Nothing.
Two – That’s what mathematicians call catastrophe theory.
One – Catastrophe theory?
Two – How the very gradual, continuous evolution of a single parameter can suddenly, at a precise moment, produce a brutal break in continuity and an irreversible tipping point.
One – For example?
Two – A branch we’re sitting on, slowly sawing through it, until it suddenly snaps, taking us down with it.
One – I see… That’s what we call the straw that breaks the camel’s back, isn’t it?
Two – Exactly. It’s like rising waters.
One – Or a boat that is sinking because there’s a small hole in the hull.
Two – The water rises by one centimetre every hour. You can barely see it, and at the time it doesn’t change anything.
One – But by the end of the week, the boat has sunk by more than a metre.
Two – We think it’s not worth stopping the cruise for that, or putting the boat into dry dock to plug the hole. But at some point, the boat will suddenly go straight to the bottom, and nothing will be able to keep it afloat any more.
One – We know that after a month the boat will have sunk, but the captain doesn’t dare put the crew out of work. And as long as the cruise is having fun…
Two – Catastrophe theory also applies to social phenomena. For centuries, the people accept tyranny without flinching, and then suddenly…
One – Enough is enough.
Two – And that’s revolution.
A pause.
Two – The French managed to guillotine their king in order to have their revolution, but we are incapable of rebelling to stop this.
One – Who could we guillotine?
Two – I don’t know… The King of Spain?
One – Do you think the King of Spain is responsible for global warming?
Two – No, but guillotining a king would make us feel a bit better, wouldn’t it?
One – Yes…
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A sketch from the collection Apocalypse
Link to the collection for free download (PDF)
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