Sarah Cochrane and Joe Kelly – Fit For Nothing

Esther McManus – Elsewhere

“Because I work I am nothing” – Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

“No food in my stomach and my pockets fucked up Plus my mother still work, so why should I give a fuck?” – Mr. Muthafuckin eXquire, ‘The Last Huzzah (Remix)

Two different ways of transforming the experience of poverty into art, though anyone who longs for dark times because they want a new punk boom is not to be trusted.  We don’t know what art would have been created without a decade plus of government hostility towards those who aren’t optimally useful to capital… you know, people with disabilities, people who’ve had kids when some weirdo thinks they shouldn’t, people who had the audacity to get sick, or have a bad month, or fall behind their monthly quota… but we can be fairly sure that talented people would have done good work regardless.  The death and pain caused by these political realities is undeniable, however, and while we shouldn’t measure a government by how many albums we bought along the way, we might want to ask whether art made in such a hostile environment has enough to offer us.

Which is to say that if we’re going to accept an invite to a party in the year of our lord 2021, we might want to be sure that we’re not going to end up with someone who’s going to start banging on about how people should just keep calm and whip up some lobster ravioli using the leftovers they found in their spare sowing rooms…

Fit For Nothing isn’t exactly shy about its politics.  Billed as “the story of a dead man’s search for work”, it takes the hateful illogic of fit-for-work assessments to their endpoint and assumes that there’s no reason why the demands to work should stop once someone has drawn their last breath. It gets there via a playfully daffy skit featuring a glib job centre employee’s holiday to Egypt, but even this jokey introduction makes the direction of Cochrane and Kelly’s anger impossible to ignore…

The body of the comic develops this attack on administrative indifference to the fullest…