Editing 2892: Banana Prices
Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
The edit can be undone.
Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
Latest revision | Your text | ||
Line 10: | Line 10: | ||
==Explanation== | ==Explanation== | ||
− | [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw ‘It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?'] is a line from an {{w|Arrested Development}} episode (Season 1, Episode 6, "Charity Drive", 2003) that became a well-known meme used to mock out-of-touch elites. The character who spoke this line (Lucille Bluth, a wealthy socialite) made a satirically high estimate for the price of a banana because she had never bought her own groceries. According to the graph, the banana price at the time of that episode was actually just under 25 cents, and the price at the time of this comic’s publication (2024) is around 30 cents. | + | {{incomplete|Created by a MANDALORIAN BANANA ARMORER - Please change this comment when editing this page.}} |
+ | |||
+ | [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw ‘It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?'] is a line from an {{w|Arrested Development}} episode (Season 1, Episode 6, "Charity Drive", 2003) that became a well-known meme used to mock out-of-touch elites. The character who spoke this line (Lucille Bluth, a wealthy socialite) made a satirically high estimate for the price of a banana because she had never bought her own groceries. The implication is that she sees $10 as a trivially small amount of money, and has trouble conceiving of anything that costs less. According to the graph, the banana price at the time of that episode was actually just under 25 cents, and the price at the time of this comic’s publication (2024) is around 30 cents. | ||
The comic is a wry observation that the irony of this sitcom line will "probably" be anachronistically meaningless in a century or so, presenting three predictions of banana prices over the next 250 years that each extrapolate from the current 2024 price using different long-term inflation rates. | The comic is a wry observation that the irony of this sitcom line will "probably" be anachronistically meaningless in a century or so, presenting three predictions of banana prices over the next 250 years that each extrapolate from the current 2024 price using different long-term inflation rates. | ||
Line 29: | Line 31: | ||
* '''Log scales''' and their peculiarities are a recurring xkcd theme, and this is the second comic in a row to play with logarithms (the prior one being [[2891: Log Cabin]]). | * '''Log scales''' and their peculiarities are a recurring xkcd theme, and this is the second comic in a row to play with logarithms (the prior one being [[2891: Log Cabin]]). | ||
* It's also the second comic in the last four to involve '''predictions across centuries''' (i.e. [[2889: Greenhouse Effect]]). | * It's also the second comic in the last four to involve '''predictions across centuries''' (i.e. [[2889: Greenhouse Effect]]). | ||
− | * ''' | + | * Another '''extrapolation''' comic includes [[605: Extrapolating]]. And this comic looks a lot like [[1007: Sustainable]]. |
===Discussion of price references in fiction=== | ===Discussion of price references in fiction=== | ||
− | It's common for fictional works to | + | It's common for fictional works to avoid mentioning actual prices or amounts of money. One reason is that presenting an actual amount risks the work becoming dated by inflation. A price that's presented as surprisingly high can lose its impact as the value of money changes, making it difficult for a punchline or a dramatic moment to land. In this case, however, the number is so exaggerated (being around 40 times higher than the actual price of a banana), that it's unlikely for inflation to impact the joke in the immediate future. Twenty years after the episode first aired, the joke works just as well as it did. |
− | |||
− | |||
− | |||
− | |||
− | |||
− | |||
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== |