Economists and Comedians

Via naked capitalism, The Irish Times highlights a gathering of economists and comedians at Kilkenomics Festival.  My favorite part:

The highflying economists found at Kilkenomics already have a maverick disposition. This is clear at Friday’s SAS Young Economist of the Year competition where the aforementioned Black, one of the judges, refers to a “drug-crazed roommate” in an anecdote and Nobel-tipped behavioural economist Dan Ariely explains the concept of scarcity with reference to overweight elephant seals who “sometimes kill the females when they copulate.”

“I really hope there’s a point to this,” says worried compere Colm O’Regan, before fine-tuning the story for the school-going audience: “When a male seal and female seal like each other very much…”

WTF?  The use of the word copulation brings up a couple of memories.  First, looking up copulation in our thesaurus was the most popular use for the book at our parochial grade school.  Second, when we were doing public speaking in drama class, one of the guys commented on a presentation by writing, "good oral copulation."  When the teacher read it, she burst into tears and left the room.  That wasn't expected.