The night is almost over. The angels have told Lot that the city is finished. Genesis 19:14 describes his frantic effort to save the only other relatives he has in town.
"And Lot went forth, and spake with his sons-in-law who had taken his daughters, and said, Arise, come forth from this place; for the Lord destroyeth the city. But the word was as a wonder, (and he) as a man ranting, in the eyes of his sons-in-law."
The Aramaic phrase Targum Pseudo-Jonathan uses — "as a man ranting" (kegever m'talel) — carries the flavor of a drunk on the street corner. To the sons-in-law, Lot looks like a madman shouting about the sky falling. They had spent their whole lives in Sedom. Its prosperity, its fortifications, its wealth were the most obvious, solid, unquestionable facts in the world. How could the city fall? On what timeline? For what reason?
This is the tragedy of the righteous warner in every age. The prophet sees the fire; the neighbors see a guy yelling. Noah's generation ignored him too, according to the rabbis, and so did the generations of Jeremiah and Elijah.
The rabbis of Bereshit Rabbah noticed something else here: the sons-in-law had not yet married Lot's daughters — they had only betrothed them. When the verse says they "had taken his daughters," it means they had committed to them, not consummated the unions. So when the city burned, the daughters escaped unmarried, and their lives continued, however strangely (Genesis 19:30-38).
The takeaway: a warning you laugh at tonight may be the warning you remember in the morning, when the sky is on fire.