Comedy

The comedian was unfunny, the chair uncomfortable, and I had a sneaking suspicion that my dinner was attempting to make a run for it.

Despite being proclaimed as ‘A Side-Splitting Barrel of Laughter for the Whole Family’ I wasn’t overly convinced. The only thing I could see close to splitting was the dress of the woman sitting next to me, whose heaving gouts of laughter placed a tone of wonder on the miracles of modern fabric design. A family sitting further along seemed divided in opinion: the parents looked on with undisguised mirth; the children seemed to share my distain and sat around listlessly, kicking the chair in front of them. I considered doing the same, but the ex-naval tattoo on the man in front of me suggested, quite politely, that this might not be such an excellent idea.

I allowed my eyes to wander. The bar was one of those derelict places (but almost intentionally so, as if to save on cleaning) which appear cheap, but are simply dingy and populated entirely by college students who don’t know any better. A dartboard hung packed away in the corner, in prescience of the comedian’s performance. A single family populated the table to the right; the remainder were filled with the usual assortment of dull-comics and habitual barflies. A few spiels of laughter rang out occasionally like the dying calls of a moribund bird indigenous to Australia.

I played with the napkin in front of me, and attempted unsuccessfully to shepherd a piece of lettuce to the centre of the plate, where something dark was hiding embarrassedly. I placed down my knife, edged the plate determinedly away and perfected the wings of my origami swan.

“You’re not really listening to this, are you?” a voice from my left asked. The comedian had just descended into a Republican parody which had been lifted clumsily from last week’s Saturday Night Live.

The voice belonged to a woman at my side who look positively enraptured in the performance. I said something to the effect of ‘If I could tear my ears off without making a scene – I would’ and she laughed.

“It’s genuinely awful. Which also means that it’s the best performance I’ve seen in months.”

I looked at her quizzically. She was blonde in a way which spoke more of sunshine than hydrogen peroxide, and had a figure that was svelte instead of ginormously rotund.

“There are few things in life more liberating than seeing something that is a complete and utter disaster. You give up the idea that comedy needs to be structured and controlled - that seriousness needs to be something moody and austere. Instead, you’re left with something that has so left the mark, which has departed so far beyond either the serious or comic that it becomes farce. It becomes wonderful for that. I love it.”

 I stared at her in a way which I hoped displayed befuddlement and bemusement without appearing creepy. She laughed.

“Look at this place – have you honestly ever seen a place as hole-in-the-wall, as awful and dingy and just plain dirty as this is?” Something scurried out from behind her plate, did a circuit around the table and returned slightly abashed, as if that was all the exercise it was willing to do today. She ignored it, and continued. “It’s wonderful. It makes me happy to see that there are still places like this – places where they are so far removed from what should be in society that it becomes beautiful instead. You feel a part of it, the grime, the dirt, the unwashed glass and infested beer. But at the same time you feel apart from it, able to recognise the farce with amusement and incredulity.”

I looked from her to the failing comedian, who had started on an unconvincing impression of the former president.

“Part of you realises this, doesn’t it? You didn’t walk in from the street to see an unsigned comic with the expectation that they would actually be good.” She peered at my clothes. “You certainly didn’t arrive here to meet with someone. No, part of you realises that there is something magical about seeing the terrible in life occasionally. This kid might actually be good one day; he may put all evidence aside and actually make a name for himself. But until then he only retains the potential for that. Now, he is simply awful – determinedly, enthusiastically but above all genuinely awful, and for that it is a gripping performance.”

I spent the remainder of the performance in relative silence, digesting everything that she had said. Eventually, I asked her if she would like to get a drink afterwards.

She laughed. “I like things that are awful, but that would be pushing it.”

I left alone, uncomfortably.

I hate comedians.

Unapologetically Dismal Science

A few days ago I was asked about the title for my blog by a group of inquisitive aunts. Admittedly they were more concerned with the fact that I may have described them all as hiding their ‘cloven hooves’. Just for them, here’s another Wodehouse quote:

“If I had my life to live again, Jeeves, I would start it as an orphan without any aunts. Don’t they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?”
“Odalisques, sir, I understand. Not aunts.”

The name Dismal Science refers to the dark, slightly tongue-in-cheek alternate name for Economics; Unapologetically is simply a word with far too many syllables crammed into a small area, which allowed me to take a bizarrely vacant url. While the term ‘dismal science’ is properly attributed to Thomas Carlyle, it’s frequently used to describe the work of Reverend Thomas Malthus, which is where I first came across it a couple of weeks into first year economics. The dark, pessimistic theory it described was one of the first indicators that I might genuinely love economics, and that the decision to change out of Law was a completely justified one.

Considering this is my first post actually dealing with economics, it’s a little more technical than I usually write, however the concepts are interesting and generally simple, so I hope that you’ll bear with me.

As described in the textbook, Malthus’s theory was constructed in two parts: the amount of food each person requires, and the amount of food that each person can produce. The first part increases linearly – each individual person requires the same bare minimum amount of food, on average, to avoid starvation and survive. It can be described with a simple formula Y=NF where N is the population size, F is the necessary food for each person, and Y is the total amount of food required (because Y not?). 

The second part is a little more complicated, taking into consideration the idea of Diminishing Marginal Returns, which basically means that each successive unit of input produces less than the one which preceded it. The idea for this is pretty simple to follow: Malthus believed that the total area of farmable land was fixed, or limited. A farm which only has a few people working on it can produce far more if another person starts working on it; when you have an additional 50 or 100 people however, they will start getting in each other’s way and produce less individually than that first person’s contribution to the farm. Labour for the farm has diminishing marginal returns. 

The same applies for machinery. A single hoe or tractor can make a massive difference in productivity for a farm. When there are a hundred, the workers will be too busy fighting over who gets to use the shiniest one than actually doing any work. The thing to take away from this is that production does not increase linearly – each individual worker does not produce the same amount whether you have 10 or 50. Individual production decreases as the amount of workers increases.

If you've got gardening problems, I feel bad for you son.
I've got 99 problems, and a hoe for every one.

When the amount of food being produced is more than what’s required by the population, there’s a surplus. People eat more, are happier – live longer, and breed like rabbits. The population increases.

When the amount of food being produced is less than what’s required, there’s a shortage. People starve, and aren’t very happy; the mortality rates increase, and while people might still be breeding like rabbits, the overall population decreases.

The effect of this is that the population approaches an equilibrium, where food being produced is the bare minimum to avoid starvation. At this point there is no tendency for population to increase or decrease - it’s a point of stability in misery. It’s a dismal place to be. 

It must be noted that Malthus’s theories were developed before the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and before the extent of globalisation that we see today. You can produce a lot with a hoe or tractor, but you can produce much more using a combine harvester. Technological progress is one of the defining reasons why we don’t simply subsist in a Malthusian equilibrium.

The theory still has some relevance in today’s society: large parts of the world still live in abject poverty and famine, and certain aspects of subsistence agriculture can still be examined using Malthusian theory. Neoclassical Growth Models in particular bear more than a passing resemblance to the Reverend's work.

More importantly, I can finally explain the name of this unfortunately titled blog.

Parade

It was after midnight on a winter evening.

A woman sat alone at a bar; nursing a drink with a pensive, melancholic air. She sat alone because it’s far easier to describe someone if they’re sitting alone in a bar, nursing a drink with a pensive melancholic air. Imagine if she had been with a group of friends – the entire setting would have been run over by a bunch of gaggling sorority students giggling and making half-guarded glances at the barman’s pants. No, she was sitting alone. It was pensive and melancholic and just a little moody.

She sighed, and a lock of hair hung languidly over her cheek. She was formally dressed, in nice clothes that were expensive but looked far cheaper. Her face was pockmarked, owing to a juvenile bout of acne which had decided to make a rather hasty retreat after college, but still left the scars of a prolonged battle. It had been covered with a delicate slathering of make-up. She looked quite pretty when all was said and done.

She finished the remainder of her drink, and called for another one; an oleous, swirling bourbon which glinted warmly in the bar-light, because no one drinks UDL’s in a story. Her eyes glittered also as she stared; a warm touch of ebony and topaz which mirrored her drink and which were made pretty more from a trick of the light than any inherent pulchritude.

“How long are you going to stand there, throwing out descriptions to ignore the fact you have no idea where this story is going?” she called directly out of the page.

I was taken aback. Fictional entities don’t generally speak to me.

“Oh come, now. Stop looking so surprised, and come and have a drink,” she beckoned to an empty barstool beside her and waved her hand impatiently.

Dumbfounded, I took up my place, writing in an incorporeal, spectral presence to the chair which seemed to fit the omniscient presence someone should have in a story of their own creation.

She looked mildly piqued.

“No. Real. Full body and everything. And all of that fog and ethereal light just looks silly.”

Deeply blushing I appeared beside her, feeling very abashed and silly.

She looked on incredulously. “You couldn’t have made more of an effort? Written in a square jaw, or broad shoulders? Eyes a piercing blue like an iceberg overlooking an arctic sea? A longer hairline – larger muscles and a tan?”

I looked down in my chair, embarrassed.

“At the very least you could have chosen some better clothes. What are you wearing – it looks like a bag draped over a skinny tree. And those colours – awful. Do you ever even wash it? And that aftershave – it’s nauseating.”

I couldn’t say a word. She peered on again, exasperated.

“You’ve actually missed a spot shaving. And where you didn’t, it’s covered with tiny cuts. What are you, twelve?”

I mumbled that I hadn’t expected to be going anywhere tonight.

“I certainly hope not!” She exploded, incredulously. “Come on, at the least you can buy me a drink. It’s on you by the way.”

I bought myself a scotch, fumbling in my pockets for loose change. It tasted insipid, which I suppose is to be expected for an entirely fictionalised drink. It had the desired effect however, and we started talking.

It turned out that she was some part of my subconscious that I had inexplicably included writing. Some recollection, a relationship’s reflection - the moral turpitude of my psyche and id, and a surprising amount to do with a downed cup of coffee. I thought it was all rubbish, but she was very drunk by that point.

We stumbled out of the bar around two o’clock. The night air hung with the stillness of summer. Crickets chirped contentedly; the world stumbled with a thick, lumbering gait. The stars came in and out of focus uncertainly, and the moon was bigger and brighter than any moon had a right to be.

We hung off each other laughing exuberantly. Her skin was pale and soft and flawless, her waist firm and hard and warm. A sudden breeze whipped her dress into the air. She slapped me.

“Don’t be fresh!” she exclaimed, her mouth a perfect ‘o’ of shock and lascivious modesty.

We came upon her house. I asked her if she would like me to come inside, and she hesitated.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.” Her skin was flawless porcelain, her eyes indescribably beautiful. “But you should come by if you’re ever in the area, figuratively.”

She kissed me on the cheek, but it travelled quite by its own reckoning to my lips, where it lingered, warm and mournful.

She entered the house, closing the door with a short little glance behind her.

I put down the pen, and woke up with a hangover.

Manque de Pain

Perhaps the most painful thing to happen yesterday – and it was a bad day, all things considered – was that I didn’t have any toast.

By ‘I didn’t have any toast’ I don’t mean that there was any overtly material deficiency of toast in my life. I mean that there wasn’t any bread there to be toasted when I wandered down to the meal room late last night. I had of course had two slices of toast for breakfast, and another two in the afternoon. But it was tragic all the same.

My back ached arthritically in an arthritic ache of arthritis that had inconceivably decided to be more than 30 years better than punctual. It gave off comforting murmurs of pain at every touch, like a lovably neglected puppy left outside in a rain storm with a less than satisfactory bowl of kibble.

The internet was down, so I was forced to grapple with the fact that I still can’t speak a recognisable word of French. People always seem surprised when they hear that I’m studying two languages, but frankly I speak them to the point where if I ever managed to convince a native speaker that I wasn’t dropped on the head as an infant, I’d consider it an occasion to break into spontaneous jig, which would cause their opinion to be immediately reassessed.

I don’t like admitting that I study them – it sounds pretentious and academic, and brings to mind images of sitting down under a lamp with an esoteric text and dictionary, making insightful notes and practising conjugations. Which is what I should be doing, but rarely - if ever - or will ever, do. In reality, the truth is that I lay sprawled over the computer watching some anime or movie thinking happily ‘Hey! I know some of these words.’

I took a photo of myself last night to prove to some high schoolers that I do indeed have a monocle, and in the vanity that I do indeed have a monocle. The face that stared back was one tinged slightly red, a few scars in the process of recovering from acne; skin that will become hard and ugly later in life glinting prophetically. The cheeks showed the nascent visage of newly formed fat, showing that at least some progress is being made on my medically-advised binge, and reminding me that I need to start going to the gym again.

I shaved yesterday, but not today; deciding that at least the hint of stubble was the right spirit for taking a university exam. It was a small, annoying quiz that suited my 36 o’clock shadow perfectly.

Yes, this is a motley collection of non sequitur mussed mishmash. (I really just wanted to use 'mussed' in a sentence).

Procrastination

I should be studying.

Instead I’m perched on my bed listening to Nine Inch Nails, starting the first blog in a month to avoid admitting how very little I actually know about Economic Development. That’s right – this is procrastination, plain and simple. I’m currently far more concerned with the causes for my poverty than Causes of Poverty, which at this moment includes Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails.

I have green tea mochi. Microsoft tried to autocorrect that to mocha. I can’t imagine what green tea mocha would taste like, and it’s not an experiment I’m willing to try out, despite the bar of chocolate in my fridge advertised as having just a ‘Touch of Sea-salt’. There’s a limit to my madness, however I’d draw the line conservatively.

My innards are twisting themselves into new, unusual and frankly creative patterns in the concerted agreement that perhaps the chicken tikka wasn’t such an excellent idea.

I started procrastinating this optimistically described attempt at procrastination in a little over 3 paragraphs totalling far less than 200 words. I’d say that this speaks wonders for my knife-like focus and motivation. I am useless.

Here are some pictures of cats. I’ll trust that this makes up for it.

Not a cat. Dog-mop.