A Satirical Comedy Sketch About Revolt and Revolution
One character, male or female, is there. Another arrives.
One – What’s all that noise?
Two – A riot.
One – A riot?
Two – In the suburbs, people don’t have air conditioning. They’re dying of heat. Literally. So they’re heading to the capital. They’re occupying every place that has air conditioning. Offices, government departments, ministries… The police are trying to stop them getting in…
One – You can even hear gunshots…
Two – If anyone had told me that one day people would be fighting for a bit of cool air…
One – A bit of cool air… They’re fighting to survive, that’s all…
Two – And the government is doing nothing?
One – The president will address the nation this evening… from his air-conditioned office.
Two – What can he possibly tell us now? To close the shutters during the day? To remember to stay hydrated?
One – They knew. They did nothing all these years.
Two – And now they tell us nothing can be done any more. That it’s too late. That we have to adapt if we don’t want to disappear, like the dinosaurs.
One – We knew too. And we did nothing either.
Two – What could we have done?
One – We could have rebelled. In the past, we were capable of calling a general strike for wage rises. And yet we were never bloody capable of doing the same thing to avoid dying of heat, or being submerged by rising waters.
Two – Because it’s a global problem. People said to themselves: what’s the point of stopping pollution here, if the rest of the world keeps burning coal and oil? Just so they can flood us with cheap products.
One – True. We lacked solidarity. And now we’re all going to die. Together.
Two – We thought only human beings were mortal, not Humanity. And yet, on the scale of the universe, Humanity has existed only for a brief instant. How could we believe it would live for ever?
One – We make fun of the dinosaurs because they failed to adapt. But dinosaurs dominated the Earth for nearly 200 million years. Humanity as such has existed for only a few tens of thousands of years, and it is already on the brink of extinction.
Two – Besides, the dinosaurs succumbed to an external cause. A meteorite impact. They didn’t have much time to adapt. Human beings are going to die from the consequences of their own behaviour, because they are incapable of changing it.
One – Like a smoker or an alcoholic who dies of cancer because he didn’t have the willpower to stop drinking or smoking in time.
Two – It’s as if the end of Humanity were already written into its own genes. Man is a time bomb.
One – And the countdown has begun…
A pause.
Two – Do you know where the expression “dog days” comes from?
One – No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me…
Two – In Latin, canicula means “little dog” — or, more precisely, “little bitch”. It was the Roman nickname for Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, located in the constellation Canis Major, the Great Dog. In Antiquity, people believed that when Sirius rose at the same time as the Sun, its heat added to the Sun’s and caused the hottest days of summer — the famous “dog days”.
One – So heatwaves are nothing new…
Two – No… And neither is global warming. By starting to make fire, prehistoric humans set off this deadly process, which accelerated with the Industrial Revolution.
One – What we need is a second Industrial Revolution, but in reverse. To stop this infernal machine…
Two – Do you think it could begin with this riot?
One – The question is whether it’s a revolution, or just a revolt…
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A sketch from the collection Apocalypse
Link to the collection for free download (PDF)
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