The Wit’s Guide to Heat Waves

Or, continual states of inelegance

Here’s hoping Józef Chełmoński gave this Ukrainian peasant some water in 1875.

Why do people ask if it’s hot enough for you as though it were a witticism? Is the twist that you, the subject of the jibe, are always bragging about your high tolerance for heat and have finally now been brought to heel? Or perhaps it’s to suggest that our individual preferences melt into one communal puddle at a certain temperature, a reminder that you’re no cooler than anyone else? No, this inane question that’s been asked since Victorian times is actually an indicator that it’s too sweltering for original thought. It’s the brain’s attempt at self-regulation.

“Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel certain that they mean something else.”
— Oscar Wilde

When you’re plotting a climactic scene, it’s always helpful to set it during a heat wave. Feverish delirium can then be explained away; perhaps the gun went off because his hands were so sweaty. In The Great Gatsby, the big showdown happens on the hottest day of the year, when everyone loses their composure and says what they really think, which in the case of a sweaty train conductor is “Some weather! hot! hot! hot! Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it ... ?”

“What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.”
— Jane Austen

And then there’s the eternal quest to fry an egg on the sidewalk during a heat wave. Do asphalt-cooked eggs taste better? Of course not. Does pavement ever really get hot enough, without the help of metal pans or sun-focusing mirrors? No. But like the half-witted question about whether it’s hot enough for you, this concept has also been around since the 1800s.

“One moves slowly through the days and nights, pretending to be more than half-alive.”
— M.F.K. Fisher

Humans don’t have a monopoly on moronic responses to hot weather. Southern pied babblers lose their ability to solve simple puzzles; zebra finches can’t get mealworms out of transparent tubes; mice forget what they did yesterday; guppies can’t get through mazes; and bumblebees fumble simple colour recognition tests. All this I learned from Marta Zaraska’s article with the excellent headline “They call it stupid hot for a reason.”

“Heat, ma’am! It was so dreadful that I found there was nothing for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones.”
— Sydney Smith

All of the above plus the fact it’ll be 28 degrees today (for my readers who don’t use Celsius, that’s 301.15 Kelvin) leads to one obvious conclusion: As the world gets hotter, we are getting dumber. We are certainly stupidifying: The Flynn Effect, wherein IQ scores rise over time, has been in reverse for almost 20 years. We know this because as it backs up, it makes a loud beeping noise — and sadly, people still get run over by the Reverse Flynn Effect. Idiots!

“I can out sweat all the big local sweaters and they are going to bring in outside competition and have me sweat derrier grosse motos.”
— Ernest Hemingway, who had me until those last three words

What is to be done? As usual, Irving Berlin has the answer. In his 1933 standard Heat Wave, he identifies the cause of our discomfort: A sultry dancer from Martinique. “She started a heat wave,” he asserts without evidence, “by letting her seat wave / And in such a way that / the customers say that / She certainly can / can-can.” Now that we know the truth, we can switch our ACs for heat pumps, stop cracking eggs on the street, and limit our exposure to high-kicking cabaret dance at least until the autumn.

“If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?”
— Steven Wright

You know those smug Swedes or Germans or Brits who say there’s no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing? Well, doesn’t that whole precious line of argumentation wilt when the mercury gets high enough? And next week?

Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week, I’ve been thinking about this observation on the power of satire:

“Those wonderful Berlin cabarets, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.”
— Peter Cook

… specifically with respect to The Onion’s successful wrangling of InfoWars.com from the ghoulish Alex Jones in a Texas bankruptcy court. The comedian Tim Heidecker and Onion CEO Ben Collins explained the project well on The Daily podcast this week, including how they’ll share the proceeds of this new venture with the families of the Sandy Hook victims. So far, the site has declared that Jones popped like a balloon in his car two months ago, alongside parodies of the scammy ads that kept Jones afloat such as Skull Coning to Maximize Your Intellect and Truth-Knowing, Crab Salts Ultra, and Win a Chance to Become A Car. Could this be both funny and an actual force for good in the world? And if Crab Salts Ultra are 60x more powerful than regular Crab Salts, why was I wasting my time with regular Crab Salts?

Get Wit Quick No. 378 was slightly delayed when my computer evaporated in the heat, but once it condensed we were good to go. The mascot of this newsletter is Magnus the magpie, named after the magician from the Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck, because I’m a big music guy. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. If it’s too hot to tap the ❤️ where you are, tap the one in this email.