LOLs: Secret Weapon Against CFCs and CO2?

Abstract

• Read This Chapter If You Do Not Want to Get F**ked

The climate crisis is serious, confusing, and has a lot of words people don’t understand. But everybody understands comedy! So, how do we weave these two very different fields together? Well, we don’t have to—it’s already happening. This chapter gives a brief overview of the history of entertainment-education; highlights research that demonstrates the efficacy of comedy as a communication strategy; details how various creators are using comedy to break down barriers to understanding how completely f**ked we are if we fail to build a more inclusive, justice-oriented clean energy economy; and explains what the climate change comedy field needs to move forward. If being completely f**ked is not on your agenda or the agenda of the future generations in your family, please read this chapter and join these collective efforts. Increased support and engagement could open doors for more mass media outlets, shows, and other entertainment projects to improve accessibility for the climate justice movement and invite more allies into it.

You see this line? It’s global temperatures, okay? And it’s going UP! It’s going up!!! If this was going down, you’d be right, and WE’D be the dumbasses! But it’s going UP! So YOU’RE wrong, and YOU’RE the dumbass! Okay?! Even if you flip the chart upside down—IT’S STILL GOING UP!!!–Ronny Chieng, Correspondent on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (2021)

Climate change is predominantly regarded as a serious and boring domain, associated with things that don’t light the average person’s fire, such as Doom and Gloom™ (Clayton et al., 2015; O’Neill et al., 2013) and granular data on things such as rainfall rates and ocean temperatures.¹ It’s not something you’d want to bring up immediately at a party, per se—unless you’re trying to clear a six-foot radius around yourself so you can let one rip in peace (the original social distancing). Some people still don’t even accept that it’s happening, hence Ronny Chieng’s rant above, but even those who do accept that global warming is happening often end up feeling helpless due to the massive scale of the problem (Borum & Feldman, 2020) and unmotivated due to its diffuse, slow-moving, and future-concentrated consequences.

All this leads to a lot of hesitation around making comedy about climate change à la Chieng. Is there anything funny about climate change, people think? Is it even appropriate to make jokes about climate change? Will we offend the coral reefs and risk being canceled by rising sea levels? Will climate change comedy actually make people laugh, or will it be kind of like when Ken at the office makes “jokes” during his slide deck presentation and we all sort of go “heh, heh, heh,” in a bored, mechanical way with dead eyes and deader spirits?!²

The answer is yes, Yes, YES, and we’ll explain, but first, allow us to introduce ourselves. We are two comedy writers and performers who are passionate about advancing climate justice. Climate justice, for those who may not know, is a response to the climate crisis that acknowledges (1) climate change is a product of the extractive capitalism cemented by colonialism and slavery, and (2) that it exacerbates social justice issues today—especially racial justice issues (Heglar, 2019; NAACP and the Clean Air Task Force, 2017; Yearwood Jr., 2020; Fig. 1 provides a good visual). Therefore, the only “solution” to the climate crisis (in quotes because the best we can hope to do is mitigate) is one that confronts these issues in tandem with the earth sciences part. Got that? Ok, cool. Now who are these two people talking your ear off at the party??³

• One of us, Mamoudou N’Diaye, is a comedian, TV/film writer, DJ, baby abolitionist, full-size mental health advocate, racial justice and climate justice creative consultant, and former seventh-grade teacher who has written for Netflix, ABC, Hulu, Apple, and Amazon with a degree in Cognitive Behavioral Neuroscience from The College of Wooster.

• The other one, Celia Gurney, is an Upright Citizens Brigade-trained improviser and video producer who spent 3 years at Climate Nexus, a climate change communications nonprofit, translating climate science and politics for the digital space using her B.A. in Environmental Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Fig. 1

Climate justice is social justice. (Image used with permission from Freedom to Breathe)

In short, we’ve always had really clear, straightforward/focused career aspirations that our boomer parents could tooooOOoootally understand and had faith in from day 1.⁴ Anyway, we felt it was important to tell you who we are so you’ll understand why this chapter feels different from the rest of this book. We’re just two comedians, standing in front of you, asking you to accept that climate justice is already starting to permeate the comedy space,⁵ and that its full permeation of that space is a key tool in the Achieving-a-Just-Transition-Before-We-All-Burn-to-a-Crisp Toolbox.⁶ By the end of this chapter, we want you to have a sense of (1) the many different ways people are combining climate communication and comedy, (2) how you might combine them yourself, (3) where the climate comedy field is heading, and (4) what it needs to get there. So we’re gonna walk the talk and discuss all this stuff using—you guessed it—comedy. And maybe a troupe of cannibalistic child mimes. Read on to find out!!!

Literature Review

Entertainment-education (EE) is a type of public health programming that combines—yep, you guessed it—entertainment (about 80%) with education (about 20%) (Coren et al., 2020). The intention behind EE is to put theory into practice to solve societal problems (Wang & Singhal, 2021). A common component of EE is transmedia, which is media outside of the show itself that reinforces the information and resources discussed in the show—for example, social media posts and online Q&As with characters (Coren et al., 2020).

One key figure in the history of EE is Dr. Albert Bandura of Stanford, who cooked up a little something called social learning theory. It was a lentil-based dish blasting more flavors at your palate than Goldfish themselves…okay fine, it was actually the idea that watching and trying to emulate others is one of the primary ways humans learn (UC Berkeley, 2021a, b). (Are you happy now??!!!⁷) In a famous study, he had children watch videos of adults beating up an inflatable Bobo the clown doll. The children then mimicked that behavior when left alone with Bobo⁸ (Goode, 2021). This showed that rewards and punishments were not the only way to shape behavior (Goode, 2021) and that an onscreen example of a given behavior could be just as influential as an in-person one (Friedman, 2013).

Then, in the 1970s, Mexican TV executive Miguel Sabido—widely recognized today as the father of EE—started blending Bandura’s theory into a delicious smoothie. The other ingredients, as Sabido details in his chapter of Entertainment-Education Behind the Scenes (Frank & Falzone, 2021), were “Wilbur Schramm’s theory of communication, Eric Bentley’s drama theory” and Sabido’s own theory of tone⁹ (Sabido, 2021, p. 18). Sabido had observed the huge behavior-modeling impact of a Peruvian telenovela, Simplemente María (Wang & Singhal, 2021). He then created a telenovela called Ven Conmigo, in which multiple characters signed up for literacy classes that were also offered by the Mexican government in real life (Desmon, 2018). Enrollment in the real-life classes grew by 1100% in the year after the show aired (Coren et al., 2020), with more than 500,000 people signing up (Sabido, 2021).

Sabido went on to create shows that talked about family planning, which gave women a blueprint for asserting more control over their own bodies (Friedman, 2013) and are thought to have decreased Mexico’s population growth rate by about one-third in less than a decade (Desmon, 2018). Sabido and his team also started collaborating with TV writers and producers in other countries. Soon there were TV shows in China and India featuring characters with HIV/AIDS, a show in Kenya that communicated the dangers of female genital mutilation, and a Bolivian radio drama about alcoholism and relationship violence, to name a few (Friedman, 2013). A recent example of EE in the USA is Hulu’s Latinx-created and Latinx-written series East Los High (Wang & Singhal, 2016), which aired from 2013 to 2017 (IMDb, n.d.-a). The show aimed to reduce pregnancy among Latinx youth via safe sex modeling by Latinx characters and reinforcement by transmedia that directed people to reproductive health resources (Coren et al., 2020).

With increasing recognition that climate justice is a public health issue, there’s a growing cohort of so-called boundary organizations bringing storytellers—many of them comedic—into collaboration with climate movement professionals.¹⁰ These include Storyline Partners, Define American (Define American, 2022), and Participant Media (Borum, 2021), Population Media Center (Ryerson & Negussie, 2021), the Skoll Center for SIE (Schwartz, 2020), the Center for Media & Social Impact (Borum & Feldman, 2020), Albert and Doc Society (York St. John University, 2021), Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, the Norman Lear Center’s Hollywood, Health & Society program, NRDC’s Rewrite the Future program (NRDC, 2022), The Center for Cultural Power, and The Good Energy Project. While Sabido’s model of entertainment-education necessitates close coordination with governments and the private sector, as well as “a solid, viable hypothesis that can be quantitatively and qualitatively tested”¹¹ (Sabido, 2021, p. 20), boundary organizations’ work typically results in a looser configuration of the two Es.¹² This is referred to as social impact entertainment, cultural strategy, or narrative strategy (Borum, 2021; Borum & Feldman, 2020; Ryerson & Negussie, 2021; Schwartz, 2020). This development reflects the way EE practitioners and social justice activists have both adapted to the “post-millennial participatory media age,” as Caty Borum wrote in her chapter of Entertainment-Education Behind the Scenes (2021, p. 44). In the time of streaming services and social media, it’s much harder to get everyone’s eyes on the same thing at once—so that’s no longer the goal. Instead, the goal is to create and maintain a “wide constellation of entertainment narratives that accumulate” to more accurately represent marginalized groups (Borum, 2021, p. 44) and move public opinion about social justice and public health issues.

TL;DR:¹³ This climate change comedy combo isn’t some obscure, irrelevant rabbit hole that one person wrote about for their dissertation before ultimately going on to work as a corporate lawyer. It’s a current iteration of a decades-long tradition of using storytelling for social change. Universities, nonprofits, “big greens,” and production companies are all in on it—and as you’ll see in the rest of this chapter, it’s gathering steam.

Fine, But Why Comedy?

Listen, we didn’t come here to prove that comedy is a worthwhile climate change communication strategy. Other people have already shown it empirically! That’s right, folks—REAL SCIENTISTS are out there conducting experiments where they get to, for example, show some participants traditional news clips and others clips from The Daily Show. That means those scientists “have to” watch The Daily Show at length to find the clips they want to use.¹⁴

However, even though we don’t have anything to prove, we want to make sure we’re all on the same page before we proceed. So we’re going to go over some of the theory, research, and case studies that show comedy is a worthwhile communication strategy, even for good ol’ Doom & Gloom™ climate change. And don’t just take our word for it—feel free to follow the trail of breadcrumbs (our citations) back to Hansel and Gretel’s house (the original sources).¹⁵ It’s a stunning, turn-of-the-century stone Tudor with all the original chimneys (meaning: the original sources are fascinating and explain their findings better than we ever could).¹⁶

Borum and Feldman’s Framework

As non-academics working on this chapter in between network TV scripts (Mamoudou) and sad little TikTok videos (Celia), we had neither the time (Mamoudou) nor the level of executive functioning (Celia) to reinvent the wheel here. Fortunately, in their book A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice, Caty Borum and Lauren Feldman (2020) shared a meticulously researched framework (synthesizing 200+ studies) explaining why comedy is a valuable tool for advancing social justice. Even more fortunately, they were kind enough to allow us to share a SparkNotes version of their framework here, seasoned with a bit of information we found via other sources.

So, without further ado, here is Borum and Feldman’s (2020) framework (plus some other stuff), all regurgitated in caveman speak.

So, Why Comedy?!? Well, It’s

• Your favorite applesauce…with a dash of truth-flavored penicillin, a Trojan horse, a spoonful of sugar, etc. See, people don’t generally think of late-night comedy shows as educational programs. But when they watch them, they usually end up learning something about serious issues—and devote more attention to those issues than they otherwise would (Baum, 2005, as cited in Borum & Feldman, 2020). Some would even say¹⁷ the teams behind late-night comedy shows are performing an important public service by doing most of the hard work to understand the news. It takes a lot less energy to watch a funny presentation than it does to do all that information gathering, analysis, and creative thinking yourself (Borum & Feldman, 2020). Plus, a 2017 study found that people actually learn more about climate change and sustainability topics when comedy is involved (Gravey et al., 2017). Figure 2 displays the interaction between comedy and climate crisis information.

• A Facilitator of Parasocial Relationships. Parasocial relationships form when people feel they know a character or an actor personally because of all the time they’ve spent watching and/or reading about them¹⁸ (Dibble et al., 2015; Horton & Wohl, 1956). When it comes to reducing prejudice against marginalized groups, parasocial contact may be the next-best thing to face-to-face contact (Kim & Harwood, 2020). For example, a 2006 study of college students found that those who watched Will & Grace more frequently harbored less prejudice against lesbians and gay men. This correlation was especially strong for the students who didn’t spend much time with lesbians and gay men IRL (Schiappa et al., 2006). Positive parasocial relationships with comedy characters (vs. characters from dramas) may be more powerful in this regard (Zhao, 2016). With regard to the climate justice movement, parasocial contact with the marginalized groups most affected by climate change could move less directly affected people towards action.

• Keeping Skeptics Busy. People don’t have as much brain space to counter-argue—or push back on ideas they disagree with—when they’re focusing on getting a joke or immersed in a funny story (Nabi et al., 2007). When participants in a 2008 experiment listed their thoughts in response to funny and serious versions of political messages, those who were exposed to the funny versions generated fewer negative thoughts about the messages (Young, 2008). Narrative comedy, meanwhile, disarms by putting great storytelling and compelling characters front and center rather than overt persuasive messages, so audiences aren’t as primed to analyze (and potentially push back on) the content they consume (Green, 2021). Narrative comedy may also reduce counter-arguing via transportation, which is when a viewer is so immersed in a story that they forget about reality (Green, 2021). Because we all know that when you get a break from reality, you do not cut it short by arguing that such-and-such character “could never afford that apartment.”¹⁹

• Straight-Talking. Comedians can tell it like it is. There’s a time and a place to appear impartial—and per John Oliver’s 2014 segment (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, 2014b), it is NOT when marginalized people are getting pummeled by climate changes that 97% of scientists agree are due to human activities (NASA, 2021). Compared to traditional media outlets, satirical news shows have a lot more freedom to add commentary, transparently share their own analyses, call out hypocrisy, and speak truth to power (Berlant & Ngai, 2017; Borum & Feldman, 2020; Martin, 2007). Perhaps best of all, they can swear! While not an end all be all, comedians shine a light on the issue—kinda like a clown holding a flashlight to an issue so politicians, special interest groups, and real fixers can get in there with their toolset and get to the real work.

• Magnetic and Sticky. Research has repeatedly shown comedy’s power to get our attention (Borum & Feldman, 2020), and a recent study found that people are more likely to remember things they learn from humorously presented news clips than seriously presented ones (Coronel et al., 2021; Yount, 2021). Scientists don’t completely agree on why comedy is memorable, but we’ll let you go down that rabbit hole on your own time²⁰ (Borum & Feldman, 2020). Anyway, apparently corporations have seen all this research, because commercials. Have you seen Allstate’s Mayhem series? Pemco’s Northwest Profile series?!²¹ (A regional classic! Seriously—run, don’t walk.) Comedy runs so rampant in commercials that “SNL can’t even do commercial parodies anymore,” according to an improv teacher one of us had once.²² So why (are the public and voluntary sectors still largely) so serious, to quote Heath Ledger’s Joker?²³

• Easily Amplified Because People Share It. A study of tweets about social issues found that funny tweets are more likely to get retweets than serious ones, and a 2021 study found that viewers of news clips are more likely to share funny clips than serious ones (Coronel et al., 2021). But enough about studies—why don’t we mix things up by getting an analysis in here?! According to the authors of a 2013 analysis of a campaign to reduce unintended pregnancies in Iowans under 30, humor was so key in getting women to share the campaign that all campaigns should consider using it²⁴ (Borum & Feldman, 2020; Campo et al., 2012; Venzke, 2012). Additionally, to top things off with some anecdotal evidence, one participant in CU Boulder’s Stand Up for Climate Change live comedy show observed that comedy helps people talk about the climate crisis without sounding like Debbie Downer all the time (Boykoff, 2019).

• Enhancing Political Will. According to a 2018 study (Nabi et al., 2018), college students’ climate policy advocacy increased after emotional experiences. Being moved to laughter is an emotional experience, and usually a more fun one than being moved to tears…unless you have a “high need for affect,” which means you enjoy feeling extreme emotions in general, including sadness.²⁵ (Green, 2021). At least a couple pieces of legislation can even thank comedy for helping them get passed: 1) the 9/11 First Responders Health Bill, which Jon Stewart advocated for on The Daily Show, and 2) the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights Act, which got a boost from a Funny or Die video called “Even Supervillains Think Our Sexual Assault Laws Are Insane” (Funny or Die, 2016; Hill & Holbert, 2017; Kim, 2019). In front of the right eyes, this shit works!

• Taught by Big-Name Institutions. An increasing number of colleges and universities offer comedy writing and/or performance degree programs, including Columbia College Chicago, Emerson College, and DePaul University (Columbia College Chicago, 2021; DePaul University, 2001–2021; Emerson College, 2021). (Obviously not all of the students who get these degrees will become comedy writers or performers—only the ones who are as funny or funnier than us. So two, maybe three people). Others offer comedy minors, like USC and NYU, or significant course and extracurricular options, like UCLA, Harvard, Indiana University-Bloomington, and UC San Diego (FOOSH Improv UCSD, n.d.; Harvard, 2021; The Comedy Attic, 2021; Tisch School of the Arts, 2021; UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television Professional Programs, 2021; University of Southern California, 2021). UNC Chapel Hill even has a famous, long-running class called Gram-O-Rama in which students write and perform sketch comedy about grammar rules (Moger, 2017). The University of Colorado at Boulder’s Inside the Greenhouse program puts on an annual Stand Up for Climate Change comedy show and runs an annual comedy video competition.

• Used by Boundary Organizations. You already heard about boundary organizations in the literature review, but here is a more in-depth explanation of one. American University’s School of Communication houses the Center for Media & Social Impact (CMSI), a creative innovation laboratory and research center (CMSI, 2021b) that produces reports on social change comedy (CMSI, 2021c) and facilitates collaborations between diverse comedians and social justice professionals (CMSI, 2021a, c). Its Comedy ThinkTanks program “curates a room of professional comedy writers and performers to collaboratively co-create with social justice groups to create original comedy—sketches, program ideas, campaigns” (CMSI, 2021a). Meanwhile, the Yes, And Laughter Lab mentors diverse comedy writers leading up to an event where they get to pitch their work to “the entertainment industry, social justice organizations, philanthropists and activists who can help bring their work into the comedy marketplace—and into movements for social change” (Yes, And Laughter Lab, 2022). (Fun fact: Mamoudou was a winner in the inaugural class of 2019!) CMSI is directed by the same Caty Borum who co-wrote A Comedian and An Activist Walk into a Bar (Center for Media & Social Impact, 2021a, b, c, d), and it received $1.1 million in grants in 2020²⁶ (American University, 2020).

• Suitable for Any Topic (When Used Responsibly). Comedy is about having a unique perspective. That’s a filter you can put on literally anything,²⁷ and comedians are doing it constantly. Tig Notaro’s breakout special was about getting diagnosed with breast cancer (Notaro, 2013). Yedoye Travis hosted Dark Tank, a podcast where he and guests debated potential solutions to racism, including “mass hauntings” and outlawing sunscreen (Travis, n.d.). Hell, haven’t you ever heard an amazing roast joke about a dead person at their funeral?! If you’re worried climate change and comedy won’t mix, then WE’RE worried…that you’ve never seen comedy. Of course, there are rules about how to and who should joke about certain topics—a comedian code of ethics, if you will. For instance, if someone’s going to be the butt of a joke, it should be a person in power; it’s called “punching up” and has a history dating back to court jesters roasting their kings and queens.²⁸ See Fig. 3 for examples of punching up vs. punching down in climate justice comedy.

Fig. 2

Interactions between comedy and climate crisis information

Fig. 3

How to (and how not to) haha the climate crisis

For your convenience, we created a mnemonic device with the first letters of each of the above bullet points so you can remember all those good reasons to use comedy for the climate. That mnemonic device is “Yaks Meet Us…” It’s a fun first half of a sentence that you can complete with “in St. Louis,” “Where We Are,” “At the Mall; It’s Goin’ Down,” or whatever feels right to you. And again, we do encourage you to check out the original, much more detailed, much more eloquently written framework as conceived and explained by Borum and Feldman (2020).

Research Questions and Hypotheses

In this chapter, we asked two important research questions:

• RQ1: Who is making climate change comedy today and in what formats?

• RQ2: What will it take to more fully harness the power of climate change comedy in order to improve the efficacy of the climate justice movement, invite in more allies, and build a more inclusive clean energy economy?

Based on our personal experiences in multiple American cities and on the Internet, we proposed the following hypotheses:

• H1: A bunch of dope creators are making climate change comedy in a variety of formats, from sketches and live shows to explainer videos and more.

• H2: In order to more fully harness the power of comedy to improve the efficacy of the climate justice movement, invite in more allies, and build a more inclusive clean energy economy, boundary organizations will need to work with writers and producers to consistently and thoughtfully integrate climate change into comedy programming. This will mean improving and increasing climate change coverage by late-night comedy shows (and perhaps giving the issue its own late-night show), as well as in half-hour comedies, stand-up specials, and other projects. Things also need to work in the other direction, which is to say comedy needs to become a more accessible, acceptable tool for teachers, organizers, scientists, and other non-entertainers in the climate justice movement.

Methodology

Sample

We asked a group of about 20 climate crisis-communicating comedians (biological sex nonwithstanding) for qualitative comedological data/content to provide contextual real-world examples of laughter measuring art option (or LMAO) style entertainment as a vehicle for Matrix-esque uploads of information about the current climate crisis, its history, and our future.

“Comedian”²⁹ (or “comic”) was defined as an artist who produced chortles, chuckles, lols, laughs, snickers, hahas, lmfaos, guffaws, giggles, “NPR-style nods of assent,” titters, crying laughing emojis, tee-hees, and/or hoots and hollers from a captive³⁰ audience, digital or live. “Roflmaos” were excluded from this study as it is not 2007. NFTs were not included in this study because frankly the authors still don’t get what they are.

“Climate crisis communication” was defined as “climate crisis communication.” It really was not that deep; if subjects discussed the impending climate crisis, its causes, effects, histories, impacts, advocates, and detractors using facts, figures, stats, data sets, infographics, PowerPoints, Windows Movie Maker, emo lyrics on their Facebook wall, tweets (or whatever that emerald heir is calling them these days), fleets (RIP), Tumblrs, YouTube, Instagram, Tik, Tok, TikTok, or TokTik, they were considered climate crisis communicators for the purposes of this study.³¹

Data Collection

Responses were compiled using a radical new quantum electron microscopic nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopic acquisition software designed to optimize a streamlining of data collection. This software is called “Google Forms.”

Respondents responded to the form and the authors kinda just took the hot parts and dropped them in this mf.³² This form was intended to produce the best results by way of the authors not having to make up nice things to say about them, but the authors were ready to let the compliments fly if this methodology was considered “challenging” by any of the respondents.³³

We sent all respondents an email with a Google Form and a promise of no money. No really. That’s it. Figure 4 shows what we followed up with a few days later.

Fig. 4

A desperate attempt at data collection

The measurements we used were a scale from “exists” to “doesn’t exist.” If the respondent communicated information about the climate crisis using comedy, it exists. If the respondent doesn’t communicate information about the climate crisis using comedy, it was weird they got the email in the first place.

Results

We got…some community responses. Like, not a lot, but not enough. The rest we added from Web research that we conducted ourselves, and it took frickin’ forever (fund your local climate change comedy communication chapter writers aka us), but the good news is H1 was supported.

We focus here on creators who have not yet reached maximum visibility in the American media landscape, and/or who, to our knowledge, have not yet been highlighted in bird’s-eye-view-style academic literature about climate change comedy. If you wanna split hairs, some of them might be better described as climate change communicators using comedy. Many other creators can be found in books like A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice by Caty Borum and Lauren Feldman (2020); Creative (Climate) Communications by Maxwell Boykoff (2019); Entertainment-Education Behind the Scenes, edited by Lauren B. Frank and Paul Falzone (2021)—and more are popping up every day. We hope that the list below can serve as inspiration, a block of case studies, and a directory³⁴ for those who are, want to become, want to collaborate with, or simply appreciate climate change comedy practitioners.

Please also note that our list is shamefully US-centric (and within that, coast- and city-centric) and English language-centric, and by no means exhaustive. Making the list was like fighting the Hydra from Greek mythology: In researching one person, we learned about two (or three, or six) others we should have been profiling, too. And there are tons more out there. So if you have created or know of any climate change comedy projects you think we should include in future editions of this book // shout from the rooftops, please email us at climatecomedyprojects@gmail.com with the subject line FYI: (Title of Project). At the very least, we will watch and, if we feel so inspired, share on social media.³⁵ WHEW, are we long-winded or what?! Let’s get to this list of creators already!

Scripted Episodic Comedy

Dallas Goldtooth

A member of the Dakota and Dine tribes (Yardley, 2016), Dallas Goldtooth is also essentially a one-man boundary organization, which we didn’t know was possible. He grew up observing his dad run the environmental justice organization Indigenous Environmental Network and then later joined its staff as a Keep It in the Ground campaigner (Funes, 2021; Yardley, 2016). Now, he plays the spirit of a long-dead Indigenous man on the FX show Reservation Dogs. It’s pretty unusual for someone to cut their teeth in the environmental advocacy world and then transition over to Hollywood, but in Goldtooth’s case, it makes perfect sense. Before joining the show, he had regularly made crowds laugh as an emcee at pipeline protests (Yardley, 2016). He had also started a sketch group called The 1491s with his stepbrother and three friends—one of whom was Sterlin Harjo, who co-created Reservation Dogs with Taika Waititi (IMDb, n.d.-b; Yardley, 2016). The show repeatedly touches on the LANDBACK movement, which calls for public lands to be returned to Indigenous people and is part of the climate mitigation puzzle (Funes, 2021; Wozniacka, 2021). You can find Goldtooth on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok: @dallasgoldtooth.

Movement Generation

Movement Generation provides training and support for organizers, and in the name of that mission, the organization has put sustained efforts into comedy. Its Green Collar Comedy YouTube videos include one where Boots Riley plays the earth (Movement Generation, 2015), as well as several co-created by The Other 98% that substitute “frack” for another F-word we all know and love. Movement Generation also executive produced the web series The North Pole, which weaves storylines about wildfires and green startups into a show about longtime North Oakland residents trying to keep their community intact in the face of gentrification, deportation threats, and more (The North Pole, 2019a, b, c). Notable cameos include Mistah F.A.B., Zumbi, W. Kamau Bell, and Rosario Dawson, who’s also an executive producer (The North Pole, 2019a; The North Pole Show, 2017). You can really go down a rabbit hole reading about the show’s actors and creative team (Reyna Amaya, Santiago Rosas, Donte Clark, Favianna Rodriguez, Josh Healey, Yvan Iturriaga, Darren Colston…), which is why it took Celia about 4 hours to write this paragraph (The North Pole, 2019a). Read more at movementgeneration.org and follow along on Twitter: @MoveGen or on Instagram: @movementgeneration.

Layel Camargo

The Impact Producer for season 2 of the climate justice comedy web series The North Pole Show (described under Movement Generation above), Layel Camargo, is a cultural strategist, land steward, filmmaker, and artist. They are a transgender and nonbinary person who is also a descendent of the Yaqui tribe and Mayo tribes of the Sonoran Desert. They graduated from UC Santa Cruz (The Center for Cultural Power, 2021) with dual degrees in Feminist Studies and Legal Studies (Camargo, n.d.) and in 2021 produced and host “Did We Go Too Far,” a podcast with Movement Generation (Vasquez & Camargo, 2021). As the Ecological Arts and Culture Manager at The Center for Cultural Power (The Center for Cultural Power, 2021), they created “Climate Woke,” a national campaign to center BIPOC voices in climate justice, alongside Favianna Rodriguez and The Center for Cultural Power (MACRO, 2022). Due to wanting to shape a new world, they co-founded “Shelterwood Collective” (Camargo, n.d.). This land-based organization teaches land stewardship, creative envisioning and healing for long-term survival. Layel was a Transformative Justice practitioner for 6 years and still finds ways to bring their lessons in alternatives to the carceral system to all their work. They were named on the Grist 2020 Fixers List (Grist, 2020), as well as celebrated by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts list of people to watch out for in 2019 (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2019). In January 2022, they spoke on a Sundance panel hosted by Favianna Rodriguez called Pass the Mic: Centering Communities of Color in Climate Storytelling, which also featured documentary filmmaker Sabrina Schmidt Gordon and Varshini Prakash of Sunrise Movement (MACRO, 2022). They support and advise on The Good Energy Project’s forthcoming Climate Storytelling Playbook (MACRO, 2022). Find Layel on Instagram and Twitter: @LayelCamargo.

Stand-Up

Hip Hop Caucus and The Center for Media and Social Impact

In August 2019, Hip Hop Caucus participated in the CMSI’s Comedy ThinkTanks program, which functions such as a traditional TV writers’ room, but mixes social justice advocates and other experts in with the comedy writers (Borum, 2020). Here’s what Hip Hop Caucus’ Think 100% page said about the film that emerged from the week-long collaboration:

Ain’t Your Mama’s Heat Wave is a stand-up comedy special from the frontlines of the climate crisis. It’s filmed in the St. Paul’s district of Norfolk, VA, a Black public housing community that is being redeveloped because of climate flooding, sea level rise, and a legacy of racist urban policies. The city of Norfolk, which is below sea level and sinking, is grappling with the climate crisis and racial injustice.

Four Black millennial stand-up comedians [Kristen Sivills, Aminah Imani, Clark Jones and this chapter’s very own Mamoudou N’Diaye] take the stage to ‘make the climate crisis funny’ in front of a St. Paul’s audience who are at risk for a Hurricane Katrina-like disaster and who are currently being displaced from their homes. Things are not so funny when it’s clear that climate threats can mean life or death. But, in the Black American tradition of struggle, resilience, and triumph in the face of existential threat, the joy of comedy, music, and art informs and empowers. (Think 100%, 2021)

Follow these two orgs on Instagram and Twitter: @HipHopCaucus and @CMSImpact. They’re both on YouTube under their full names, and you can read more at hiphopcaucus.org and cmsimpact.org.

Her-icane

Jenny Gorelick and Kate Villa started this showcase of women and nonbinary comedians in 2017 to raise money for Hurricane Maria relief efforts (K. Villa, personal communication, February 5, 2022). Then, they kept it going, intent on supporting Puerto Rico’s recovery even when the media had stopped talking about it, and fundraising for survivors of subsequent climate change-fueled disasters (Villa, 2022). Organizations supported included Hispanic Federation, RAICES Texas, and California Community Foundation’s Wildfire Relief Fund (McCarthy, 2019; Villa, 2022). Comedians such as Alex Song-Xia (Rick and Morty, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon), Mariah Smith (Keeping Up with the Kontinuity Errors), and Alison Leiby (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel; “Oh God, An Hour About Abortion”) graced the stage (Caveat, 2021; Her-icane, n.d.; Smith, n.d.; Song-Xia, n.d.). Her-icane was also selected as a semi-finalist for the Yes, And Laughter Lab (Villa, 2022; Yes, And Laughter Lab, 2019). A May 2019 Time Out blurb about the show said, “considering its consistently terrific lineups and the mounting havoc wreaked by climate change, we can safely say there’s no end in sight” (Time Out, 2019). Guess that blurb hadn’t heard about the coronavirus. Follow @villafied and @jennycestquoi on Instagram.

Sketch

The Juice Media

Founded by historian and satirist Giordano Nanni and based in Melbourne, The Juice Media is known for its Honest Government Ads videos, which imagine a world in which governments tell it like it is and use a lot of profanity (The Juice Media, 2019b). Every expletive-studded dose of reality is delivered in a relentlessly upbeat tone by Nanni’s partner, Lucy Cahill, who does the voiceovers for two “Australian” government reps played by Zoë Amanda Wilson and Ellen Burbidge (The Juice Media, 2019b). In one video, Wilson’s rep explains, with a huge smile on her face, that scientists call our current stage of climate change “We’re F**ked”…which is a change from the previous stage, which scientists called “Listen to Us or We Might Be F**ked” (The Juice Media, 2019a). In another, Burbidge’s beaming rep asks and answers questions like, “Does our EV policy include incentives to help you afford an EV? No! That would make us like governments that actually encourage EVs, like Norway!” (The Juice Media, 2021). The contrast between the words and their delivery really underscores just how much governments try to distract and placate their constituents while making no meaningful progress on climate change. The Juice Media YouTube channel, thejuicemedia, has over 800K followers (The Juice Media, n.d.). Find full-length vids there and follow @thejuicemedia on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok for more.

Global Heartwarming

Giovanni Fusetti is a scientist, clowning instructor, and permaculture designer who founded Hèlikos International Theatre Creation School in Florence, Italy (Hèlikos, n.d.). (Okay polymath!!) Tejopala Rawls is a freelance climate change professional who has worked on energy efficiency policy and faith group engagement in Australia, among other things, and who also does stand-up comedy (Rawls, n.d.). In 2015, the two came together to launch Global Heartwarming (Global Heartwarming, 2015b), a website featuring five short comedy videos about climate change for environmental campaigning organizations to use leading up to COP 21 (Global Heartwarming, 2015a). One of those videos, The Summit (alternately titled The Negotiation), shows a bunch of climate change negotiators standing on a beach throwing around fancy but ultimately meaningless words such as “unilateral agreement” and “methodological consistency” as the tide rises around them (Global Heartwarming, 2015c). Check it out on the Global Heartwarming YouTube channel.

Monty Hempel

Shortly after Kellyanne Conway’s infamous coining of the phrase “alternative facts” (Swaine, 2017), an environmental studies professor and documentary filmmaker named Monty Hempel produced a short satirical video called Alternate Science (Vol. 1). In the video, Hempel himself plays Dr. Theodore Droop, a “black carbon climatologist” who claims to have discovered a planetary cooling mechanism called “thermal erectile dysfunction.” Puns and NSFW³⁶ diagrams ensue (Boykoff et al., 2017a). Hempel, who was the Hedco Chair in Environmental Studies and the Director of the Center for Environmental Studies at the University of Redlands, sadly passed away in 2019 (University of Redlands, 2019). Nevertheless, his contribution to this field shows how comedy gives people a pass to behave in unexpected ways, which can allow for more frank expression.

Ads

Climate Ad Project

The Climate Ad Project doesn’t always make funny videos, but when it does, they’re good. Highlights from their collection include a Mars tourism ad and a clip comparing carbon offsets to “murder offsets.” This team of multidisciplinary individuals (originally brought together by, of all websites, Twitter³⁷) believes climate change deserves as many funny ads as Allstate and Amazon Alexa. The Climate Ad Project was originally the idea of NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus, who seems to know a lot more about effective science communication than Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Don’t Look Up (Climate Ad Project, 2021). Check out the Climate Ad Project YouTube channel, visit climateadproject.org, and follow @ClimateAd on Twitter and @climateadproject on Instagram for more.

The Potential Energy Coalition × JOAN

In 2019, the Potential Energy Coalition partnered with creative agency JOAN to produce a campaign called Save Florida Man (Chapman, 2020; JOAN, 2022). The campaign was inspired by the Internet’s fascination with frequent headlines about one “Florida man” or another doing something unusual, like trying to bring a kitten into a nightclub (Leibowitz, 2012). It centered around a video starring real Florida Man Robby Stratton, who made headlines in 2018 for bringing a live alligator on a beer run. In the video, Robby explains that sea level rise is encroaching on Florida Man’s natural habitat and that soon enough, newspapers might be completely bereft of Florida Man hijinx. Now, we don’t actually think Florida Man is an endangered species, and we definitely don’t want any more alligators to experience this kind of harassment. But we do want more funny videos that approach climate change from creative angles and garner millions of impressions (JOAN, 2022). With a Chief Creative Officer who writes for McSweeney’s and Reductress on the side, we know the Potential Energy Coalition will deliver—and JOAN’s past work speaks for itself (McSweeney’s, n.d.; Reductress, n.d.). Visit potentialenergycoalition.org and joancreative.com, @potentialenergycoalition on Instagram, and @JoanCreative on Instagram and Twitter for more.

Celia Gurney

AKA one of the authors of this chapter, is an Upright Citizens Brigade-trained improviser who spent 3 years immersed in climate change communications at Climate Nexus. There, she produced a comedic video series about individual climate action called #9for2019 (Climate Nexus, 2019). Think mockumentary-style videos where “random people” get asked questions such as “Why do you only date people who live car-free?” and then answer things like, “They have better butts.” The project test-drove an expanded suite of digital marketing tools, with the goal of generating sign-ups for a partner organization, The Environmental Voter Project. The #9for2019 website received over 4000 visits during the promotional period and recruited 20+ new “climate voters.” At Climate Nexus, Celia also contributed to a Black History Month series on climate justice leaders and Freedom to Breathe, a collection of events with on-the-ground climate justice advocates (Freedom to Breathe, 2018; Nexus Media News, n.d.). More recently, she created comedic content for Shut The Fossils Up and Yellow Dot Studios’ campaign to protect New York State’s climate law from fossil fuel interference. Find out what else she’s up to at celiagurney.com.

Multiple Formats

Mamoudou N’Diaye

AKA the other co-author of this chapter (pay attention) is a Brooklyn-based comedian who accidentally made his way into climate crisis communication by way of his racial justice work. He was featured in the Think 100% documentary Ain’t Your Mama’s Heatwave as the host of the comedy portion of the documentary about the climate crisis effect on the city of Norfolk, VA, and then became a writer for it (Think 100%, 2021). Prior to that, he/me/I have worked with Rollie Williams on his New York-based climate justice late-night show An Inconvenient Talk Show, where he/me/I was the DJ and occasionally a correspondent, delivering out-of-the-box solutions to the climate crisis via PowerPoint.³⁸ In 2019, I/myself/me performed at The Center for Cultural Power’s (TCCP) Climate Woke Summit and then partnered with them where I wrote sketches/web series based on climate justice with TCCP one called Law and Order: Climate Justice Unit. On top of that, I’ve written too many treatments about the integration of climate justice into a TV format and I’m just happy to be nominated at this point. Not a fan of social media so I’ll just leave this here: mamoudoundiaye.com.

Inside the Greenhouse

This interdisciplinary program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, shows students that creative, funny climate change communication is possible and helps them produce some of their own. Among the offerings are two classes (“Creative Climate Communication” and “Climate Change and Film”); a science film internship program with its own film festival; a comedy show aptly titled “Stand Up for Climate Change”; and an annual short comedy video competition open to the public, in which several people/groups on this list have placed over the years (Boykoff et al., 2017b, 2018, 2020, 2021; CIRES, 2019). We have to hand it to Inside the Greenhouse for its massively successful efforts to incubate and incentivize the creation of climate change comedy in many different formats and from many different sources. We also have to pay them $1,000,000³⁹ for helping us find a lot of the creators on this list. Follow @everydayclimate on Instagram and @ITG_Boulder on Twitter, and for cryin’ out loud, just go to insidethegreenhouse.org already.

Chuck Nice

New York-based comedian Chuck Nice has long participated in science comedy via StarTalk, the podcast he hosts with Neil deGrasse Tyson (StarTalk, 2022), but in 2019, he founded the Shhh, It’s Real Campaign, which uses entertainment to inspire young people to act on climate (Shhh, It’s Real!, n.d.). That same year, he hosted a climate change-themed variety show at NYC Climate Week (New York Comedy Club, 2019) that showcased several stand-up comics, at least one musician, and pre-recorded sketches that Nice himself wrote in collaboration with his assistant. One of the funniest aspects of his sketches is the way he incorporates children (Climate Comedy, 2021). You don’t have to look any further than the climate crisis to see that kids often act more rationally and responsibly than adults—and Nice plays with that dynamic to great comedic effect. His limited-run podcast, Pod Zero, is all about the climate crisis and features interviews with Peggy Shepard of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, comedian Roy Wood, Jr. of The Daily Show (Nice, 2021a), and climate educator Dr. Eugene Cordero of San Jose State (Nice, 2021b). All the follows: @ShhhItsReal and @chucknicecomic on social media, and don’t forget the Chuck Nice YouTube channel.

Climate Town

Climate Town’s funny explainer videos about things like the invention of the concept of carbon footprints by oil companies and fast fashion will teach you about climate change “in a way that doesn’t make you want to eat a cyanide pill” (Williams, n.d.). The series is produced by documentary filmmaker Benjamin Boult, Daily Show writer Nicole Conlan, and Rollie Williams, who also hosts (Boult, n.d.; Conlan, n.d.). It’s a natural continuation for Williams, who, in the Before Times, regularly dressed up as Al Gore and hosted something called An Inconvenient Talk Show at Caveat⁴⁰ bar/theater in Manhattan (Caveat, n.d.). He’d give a humorous PowerPoint presentation on some aspect of the climate crisis—for example, the story of the Keeling Curve. Then a comedian would come on and do a 10-minute set, and then “Gore” would interview a climate scientist (e.g., Geoffrey Supran) or climate science communicator (e.g., Kendra Pierre-Louis). For the grand finale, improvisers impersonating various celebrities would play a climate change-themed, Jeopardy-style game. On multiple occasions, An Inconvenient Talk Show moved its audience to act: once, by allowing the Sunrise Movement to recruit volunteers at a show, and later by doing a pandemic Zoom show that doubled as a fundraiser for WE ACT for Environmental Justice. If you like this paragraph’s energy, check out the Climate Town YouTube channel, @climatetown on all social media, and The Climate Denier’s Playbook, the podcast Williams and Conlan started in 2023.

Explainer Videos

Politically Aweh

A project of Bouncing Biscuit Studios with distribution by premier investigative news outlet Daily Maverick, Politically Aweh, creates fast-paced, funny, high-production value videos about South African news and politics (Schiffrin, 2019). One of those videos won first place in the 2020 Inside the Greenhouse Comedy & Climate Change Video Competition (Boykoff et al., 2020)! Titled Climate Change in South Africa: How Bad Can It Be?, it was the first in a three-part series featuring Zipho Majova as the host and frequent cutaways—to barrages of news clips, Nelly’s Hot in Herre music video, and a GIF of Troy from Community (Politically Aweh, n.d.). More recent videos include one about South Africa’s renewable energy future (Politically Aweh, 2020) and another about the Karpowership energy deal (Politically Aweh, 2021). Stephen Horn, the post-production freelancer and filmmaker who developed Politically Aweh, describes the project as “South Africa’s answer to ‘Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.’” which might sound a little cocky—if it wasn’t spot on (Horn, n.d.). Check out @politicallyaweh on social media and the Politically Aweh YouTube channel.

ClimateAdam

ClimateAdam is a YouTube channel dedicated to explaining complex ideas around climate change in playful and accessible ways (right down our alley, yeah?). But you wouldn’t know this creator’s got a British accent so for some reason it just means more and hits harder. Anyway, the ClimateAdam channel, founded in 2014, is run by Dr. Adam Levy (read that with a capital DOCTOR), a climate scientist from Oxford who makes sketch comedy-infused explainer videos. Their channel has received over half a million views (Levy, n.d.-b), with videos shared by Huffington Post, Scientific American and Upworthy (Levy, n.d.-a). ClimateAdam has been awarded funding from multiple sources, including the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Climate Communications Project (Levy, n.d.-a). In 2019, the channel was awarded second place in the Inside the Greenhouse Comedy & Climate Change Video Competition (Boykoff et al., 2019). (We can only assume any awards ceremony was hosted by Captain Planet.) Levy aims at a lot of the current climate conversations about all these damn heat waves, IPCC reports, and even the coronavirus effect on climate in a way that feels soothing—because their voice goes down like a smooth cuppa at your mate’s flat in Battersea. You can hear that voice by visiting @climate_adam on Instagram or @ClimateAdam on Twitter and TikTok.

All About Climate

Roshan Salgado D’Arcy’s channel functions as a kind of climate denier Mythbusters. In response to the common climate claim “one degree of global warming isn’t that much,” for example, he tactfully converts and contextualizes: The amount of energy absorbed by the oceans due to global warming is equal to seven billion Hiroshimas since 1871—or more than one Hiroshima every second from 1871 to 2017 (Salgado D’Arcy, 2021). Screenshots of studies referenced build credibility with viewers, as does his master’s degree in Climate Change, Development & Policy from the University of Sussex and several years working in science television production in the UK (BBC, Channel 4 and Plimsoll Productions) (Salgado D’Arcy, 2022). While Salgado D’Arcy’s use of comedy is sparing, it’s also effective, combining with his upbeat delivery to keep his 1.18K subscribers engaged. All About Climate on YouTube, people.

Just Have a Think

Dave Borlace’s dry sense of humor sneaks up on you in his 10- to 30-minute explainer videos, which often explore earth systems and renewable energy technologies. For example, in an April 2020 video titled “Is the Gulf Stream collapsing?” he describes The Day After Tomorrow as “a great action movie starring Dennis Quaid and a very young Jake Gyllenhaal, which, in the best traditions of Hollywood blockbusters, provided two hours of fabulous entertainment, but bore very little resemblance to real-world events or possibilities” (Borlace, 2020). See also the following description of his YouTube channel: “The channel is not a debating forum about whether Human Induced Climate Change is a real phenomenon or not. If that’s what you’re after then I can highly recommend chat forums on social media, where people on both sides of the argument go round and round in circles achieving precisely nothing at all” (Borlace, n.d.). Borlace created Just Have a Think in 2018 after reading Arctic scientist Peter Wadhams’ book A Farewell to Ice (Buckley, 2020). Today, his channel has over 370,000 subscribers (Borlace, n.d.). You could become one of them…

Simon Clark

Simon Clark recently finished his PhD in Atmospheric Physics and Dynamics—and you can experience this triumph vicariously in the PhD series of videos on his YouTube channel (Clark, n.d.). Or, you can click immediately over to the videos about nuclear power, the Kyoto Protocol, and how much carbon we can pump into the atmosphere before sh*t gets really serious. Spoiler alert: We don’t have much of that allowance left, and sh*t is already really bad (Clark, 2021). Clark’s editing choices, like opening a video about nuclear with footage from The Simpsons, definitely succeed in harnessing comedy’s memorability (Clark, 2020). Warning: You WILL click on the video titled “Why weathermen were illegal wizards for 97 years.” Follow @simonoxfphys on social media or just go to the famed YouTube channel!!!

Podcasters

Thimali Kodikara, Mothers of Invention

Thimali Kodikara is the series producer and a host of Mothers of Invention, a podcast about intersectional feminist climate change solutions (Robinson et al., 2018–2020; Schlossberg, 2019). Her co-hosts? Comedian Maeve Higgins and former Irish president (also Ireland’s first woman president) Mary Robinson. Casual. Kodikara works on not only an editorial strategy, but also a social justice strategy for the show, which she explains isn’t typical for podcasts (York St. John University, 2021). She and the rest of the Mothers of Invention team keep conversational chemistry fresh by playing around with hosting configurations and format. In one episode, they had climate activist Xiye Bastida come on to guest co-host with comedian Pooja Reddy (Bastida & Reddy, 2020). In another, they envisioned a climate-justiced future in which the first Indigenous woman president of the USA had just been elected and Maeve was the longtime partner of Michael B. Jordan (Robinson et al., 2020). Kodikara is big on this type of thing, advising people to create “a giant mood board” of what they want to see down the road (York St. John University, 2021). “What is the point of being artists if we can’t do exactly that: visualize the future from outside the boxes everyone else is functioning in?” she said in an interview. “We are very, very powerful in that regard” (York St. John University, 2021). Feeling inspired yet? Follow @oneloudbellow on Instagram, @apathysuckseggs on Twitter, @mothersinvent on both, and listen to Mothers of Invention at www.mothersofinvention.online or wherever you get your podcasts.

Dave Powell and Oliver Hayes, Sustainababble

Hosted by Dave and Ol, two friends who both work at environmental organizations in the UK, Sustainababble is a weekly comedy podcast about climate change and nature. They firmly believe that just because everything is really bad and getting worse, that doesn’t mean there aren’t crumbs of hilarity to be found—even if it’s only laughing at the dark sh*t some companies and businesses get up to. Episodes vary from interviews with environmental professors and activists to Dave and Ol attempting to understand something they’re told is simple but rarely is—like whether there are 60 harvests left (Powell & Hayes, 2021), or whether it’s okay to own a cat⁴¹ (Powell & Hayes, 2018). They pride themselves on their human, no-BS approach to talking about the climate and nature crisis—and having a wry, but comforting chuckle from time to time. They also wrote most of this paragraph, which is why it has a charming “across the pond” vibe.⁴² Follow @thebabblewagon for updates and find episodes at www.sustainababble.fish or wherever you normally listen to podcasts.

Journalists

Gizmodo/Earther

Brooklyn is part of New York City. So why do you have to write “Brooklyn, NY,” instead of “New York, NY” when you’re sending mail there? Earther’s relationship to Gizmodo is kind of like that, meaning: We’re confused about who to address this paragraph to. Gizmodo/Earther, please get in touch. Anyway, the people who write for this website, whatever it’s called, regularly find funny ways to talk about the climate crisis. With headlines such as “French Car Ads Will Soon Be Required by Law to Tell You Not to Drive a Car” (Ropek, 2022), “Huntington Beach High School May Want to Change Its Mascot After This Oil Spill” (Noor, 2021), and “New York City Plan to Close Streets is Weak as Hell” (Funes, 2020), you’d be forgiven for thinking you were clicking on a piece from The Onion. Except The Onion doesn’t consistently highlight the climate justice angle, or, ya know, write true stuff. Follow @EARTH3R on Twitter for regular climate snark.

Social Media

Mary Annaïse Heglar, Head Greentroller

If you have Twitter and think about climate change regularly, you’ve probably come across Mary Annaïse Heglar. She writes essays (and tweets) about climate justice and climate grief, and she gets to the heart of things so expertly that you just want to retweet all the way down her profile. She co-hosts an intersectional climate change podcast with journalist Amy Westervelt called Hot Take (Heglar & Westervelt, 2019–2021), and she also trolls fossil fuel companies on Twitter to disrupt and bring attention to their greenwashing tactics. As Kate Yoder reported in Grist (Yoder, 2020), sometimes this “greentrolling” can be pretty funny—like when BP suggested people calculate their carbon footprints and Heglar replied, “Bitch what’s yours???” (Heglar, 2019). To a recent Shell post about EVs, she replied, “This you?” and linked to an Earther article about Shell’s CEO getting roasted at a climate conference (Heglar, 2021). A highlight of the greentrolling movement seems to have been in November 2020, when Shell asked what people are “willing to change to help reduce emissions.” It was a great alley-oop for hordes of Twitter users, with nearly 8000 people quote tweeting it and many flexing their comedy writing muscles (Shell, 2020). To that we say: like and subscribe. Or more specifically, follow @MaryHeglar on Twitter and Instagram, and jump on the greentrolling bandwagon.

Climate Meme Accounts

Many of the best climate change memes around used to come from @climemechange on Instagram. Bursting onto the scene circa July 2018, the account built a 125K-strong following in just a few short years. Among other things, it once juxtaposed the statement “wind turbines are such an eyesore,” with an image of their alternative: hundreds of pump jacks littering a desert landscape. Unfortunately its old posts are no longer visible, (Climemechange, n.d.) but we hope the account will return from this dormant period someday with fresh content. Though we both know its creator personally, we’ll never reveal their identity—not even if you trap us in bathtubs full of all the deer ticks that have shifted their range north due to climate change. Mwahahaha! The @climate_memes Instagram account, meanwhile, is a little less mysterious: It’s run by Climatepedia at UC Irvine. Click over there for memes featuring Squidward and vintage Lindsay Lohan, plus a clip of Doja Cat talking about cow farts (Climate Memes, n.d.).

Alex Engelberg and Other TikTokers

Alex Engelberg (@alexengelberg) is a TikTok star who frequently combines music and comedy, to the delight of app users (Engelberg, n.d.-b). In 2021, he posted a video that started out as a corny song about ways to go green, but when he started to list his tips for being energy smart, they weren’t your typical individual actions. We won’t spoil the ending—you should just go watch it—but we will say it was impressively succinct commentary. It also has at least 2.6 million views on TikTok alone. Engelberg doesn’t typically post about climate change, and he isn’t the only TikToker who’s made a funny, one-off climate change video that went viral, but that’s exactly why this vid makes us so happy. It’s evidence that climate change is increasingly filtering into the Internet’s collective consciousness and that at least 2.6 million people recently thought about it for 31 seconds (Engelberg, n.d.-a).

Influencers

Levi and Leah

Levi Hildebrand is not just extremely photogenic⁴³ and good at what he does, but he also specializes in helping others tell their stories about the effects of climate change and other environmental research. He loves it so much that he even has his own production company that he founded in 2017 to focus on this work called One Island Media (Hildebrand, n.d.). Finding his lane as a creative consultant and collaborating with companies such as Blinkist, Klean Kanteen, and Sunski Sunglasses (Hildebrand, 2022), Levi now shares a YouTube channel with his wife Leah, and the two of them leverage it to combat climate change by promoting recycling, minimalism, and a zero-waste lifestyle and by testing sustainably sourced items for their 135K+ followers (Hildebrand & Tidey, n.d.). Those two good-natured, attractive Canadians will almost make you want to move in with them in Victoria, B.C.

Kurtis Baute

Here’s the thing about Kurtis. The man makes fire videos. His whole thing should be our whole thing; he believes in science for a better world! He believes that in order to take on big issues such as climate change the world needs to be more science literate. He believes this so much that rather than convince you through speaking to you about the atmosphere, the man sealed himself in a DIY biodome to talk about how people interact with the atmosphere (Baute, 2018). Y’all wanna know just how much plastic there is in the world? Kurtis tried to spend 24 hours not touching any plastic to show us just how prevalent it is and where it ends up (Baute, 2019). Not only that but he knows the importance of demystifying conspiracy theories such as flat earthers, tackling convenient consumerism’s effect on the environment, getting out there to protest pipelines, and, like any good community-minded person, spotlighting other climate communicators (Baute, n.d.) because, in the words of the famous Wildcats, we’re all in this together.

Scientific Papers

Scientists

Yes folks, things have gotten so dire that even scientists themselves are getting in the comedy game. In 2018, four of them—Guillaume Chapron, Harold Levrel, Yves Meinard, and Franck Courchamp—published an article in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution called “A Final Warning to Planet Earth.” It was a satirical response to the “warning to humanity” a large group of scientists had put out the year before, flipping the script and demanding that Earth—not humanity—change its behavior to resolve the whole environmental catastrophe thing (Chapron et al., 2018). Of all the canary-in-the-coal-mine moments we’ve observed while working on this crisis, scientists going all Jonathan-Swift’s-A-Modest-Proposal on us is honestly one of the scariest—and definitely the most likely to remind us of high school English class. Hats off to Guillaume & Company.

Discussion

Well damn, it’s almost as if the authors have been right the whole damn time.

Major Findings

This study sought to determine whether the causes, effects, histories, perils, and solutions to the earth’s climate crisis can be and have been effectively communicated via comedic pathways. And it identified more than 25 distinct entities doing that, so…science…win? Comedy win? Scimedy win? You get it; these findings clearly indicate that there are multiple people and groups who are actively out in the streets using their platform and senses of humor to inform the masses of the evil patterns of Big Oil, the mythic carbon footprint, the convenience economy, political interference in offsetting climate research and action, etc. They successfully disseminate pertinent and urgent information in a captivating and charming way. So, to the millions of people running around asking, “Where are all the climate comedians?” we say “Ummmmm…please stop asking that. They’re here, in this chapter. Duh.”

There is value in talking about climate change and justice in entertainment. The type of work that our respondents—and non-respondents, those f**kers—are doing needs more visibility. More visibility makes these issues easier to talk about with clear information, an easier way into a hard conversation, and connects us all under the banner of “YO IF WE DON’T HANDLE THIS WE ALL GONNA DIE!”⁴⁴

This study has examined how comedic artists are using their platforms to elevate the conversation surrounding the climate crisis and has gone some way to collect 25+ different options for multiple different tastes of comedy in one place. Phrases get lazily bandied about when the climate crisis is pitched as an area for comedic focus: It’s “too dark to talk about” and “no one is talking about it meaningfully.” Well, all of these climate comedy creators have been able to make space and take time to craft a way into the conversation using humor, and research shows how laughing can break tension. Why not use the thermal energy from that broken tension and transform it into actionable energy?⁴⁵

And that brings us to H2, which, in case you don’t remember, was our hypothesis about what it will take to more fully harness the power of climate change comedy in order to improve the efficacy of the climate justice movement, invite in more allies, and build a more inclusive clean energy economy. More good news: Everything we hypothesized in H2 was supported, and we’re about to elaborate on that for…wait, let us check…the rest of this chapter!

People learn about war, genocide, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, capitalist exploitation, etc., through mass media avenues such as The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Full Frontal with Sam Bee, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Sometimes those shows cover climate change, and they’ve been doing so more effectively for a lot longer than traditional news media (just google “Colbert Report climate” to see for yourself). However, the climate crisis has no singular voice in late night to propagate information and highlight the intersections of climate justice with many other types. And it deserves one. More about that in the “Future Work” section.

Notwithstanding, this is not all the voices out here making a splash about climate as the sea levels rise all around the world. Most of these voices highlighted in this chapter are in the continental USA and the climate crisis is global, often affecting communities that do not benefit from the hyper-focused lens of media attention on America and its (for lack of a better term) shenaniganry. Research shows the Global South and other states ravaged by settler colonialism and exploitation of working-class indigenous people are unfairly and disproportionately negatively affected by the climate crisis in ways that get invisibilized by the powers that be behind the world’s camera (Brändlin, 2019). BIPOC, immigrant, queer, native, poor, and disabled voices must be allowed at the table and not spoken for by other people.

Limitations

Building off of the point above, a major limitation of this study was limited resources to be able to travel to other parts of the world or have access to people potentially using comedy to tell their story. Even Greta got a boat, Springer! Give the authors of this chapter a raft with Wi-Fi capability in the future.⁴⁶

Another limitation of this study was the definition of humor. Humor cannot be defined by just two artist/activists.⁴⁷ Comedy is hyper-subjective; not everyone can deliver 30 Rock levels of joke volume with An Inconvenient Truth level of PowerPoint prowess and even so, that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Armed with the resources and connections at their disposal, the authors did their best to present a wide array of senses of humor, but they acknowledge that they mostly used word of mouth to find the respondents in this study, and they’re are aware that this chapter is just the tip⁴⁸ of the tip of the iceberg.

Future Work

Assuming we have a future,⁴⁹ here are some steps we’d love to take to use the accessibility of comedy to further the message of the climate crisis without leaning into the dark, dreary, depressing facts, and figures but rather laughing together with the dark, dreary, depressing facts, and figures.⁵⁰

All issue-driven comedy should shine a light on the issues and not make light of them. It’s punching up like Mario, not punching down like if Mario gave up plumbing and became a horrible open mic comedian. The respondents to this study all are shining examples of highlighting the issue at hand. The climate crisis is not only here but it has been couch surfing on the earth for decades, and it’s about time for us to address the elephant in the room; the climate crisis needs to get a job and not spend its entire day watching Judge Judy—okay I think we lost the plot here. The climate crisis is here, and we cannot pretend that a climate apocalypse is our future when we see its effects of it in our present (Well, 2022).

Al Roker, Lord of the Weatherfolk, will not be leading us to the Climate Promised Land, nor will Al Gore.⁵¹ It will take all of us to commit to change. In order to commit to change, one must know what is the problem and sometimes the best person to communicate what the problem isn’t a dry, jargon-heavy specialist. That’s where comedy comes in. So…

Let Comedy Sit at the Comms Table

Comedy needs to be taken more seriously as a communication strategy. We’re not saying “Hey, let’s treat comedians with the exact same weight that we do our elected officials!” However, what we are saying is that we need to engage the populace on the ins-and-outs of the climate crisis in a way that is personal, personalized, and unifies people around the goals outlined in climate solutions. Those changemakers can find agents in comedians who are actively using research to get the correct, pertinent, and all-inclusive messages surrounding the climate crisis to the people through their humor. It is the stance of this chapter that these artists and others, if given space, resources, and more eyes, can draw more people toward climate action and, simultaneously, demystify climate justice by adding more information to replace overwhelming doom, gloom, and anger at billionaire exoduses to low orbit (or further). Hopefully, this chapter brings even one new fan to these people but supporting them where they’re at the writing of this chapter isn’t the only way to use their talents.

Clone John Oliver, But Make It Climate

The climate crisis affects us all. Some more than others, but without a planet, where the f**k will we tweet opinions from the toilet from? Most of these hosts come from the Jon Stewart Academy of Hahas Over Boohoos, and in September 2021, a lot of them participated in Climate Night.⁵² But on the whole, none has been more impactful than Liverpool’s own John Oliver with Last Week Tonight. John Oliver’s show finds a way to take an issue that might be a bit off the mainstream beaten path and weave it into the current cultural conversation. With topics ranging from India’s elections (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, 2014c) to FIFA Corruption (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, 2014a), John talks about it all including issues that overlap with the climate crisis like floods (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, 2017b) and the Paris Agreement (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, 2017a). His show’s deep-dive format gives complex, intersectional issues more breathing room. Its once-a-week schedule allows things (the issues themselves, as well as his writers’ draft scripts) to marinate and potentially develop further before airtime.

Finesse Those Calls to Action

John Oliver is also particularly good at calls to action. Many of his hashtags and charity ventures have brought awareness, visibility, and resources to vulnerable communities through the power of comedy (Borum & Feldman, 2020, p. 65; Ohlheiser, 2015; Simerman, 2015). This man started a fake megachurch, thousands of people donated to it, and he sent all the money to Doctors Without Borders (Ohlheiser, 2015). Why did that work? We haven’t done any peer-reviewed studies on it, but maybe because he focused on one very specific ask, embedded humor in the action itself (the megachurch was called Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption), and consolidated individual actions into a more impactful collective action. You don’t have to be John Oliver to do something in that ballpark. Think of Her-icane fundraising for disaster relief and Sunrise signing up volunteers at An Inconvenient Talk Show. Watch and learn, climate comedy people—and imagine the mobilization that could happen if an Oliver-style late-night show was completely dedicated to the climate crisis’ effects, globally and locally.

Give the John Oliver Clone Some Friends

Why stop at one content perspective about climate? Our results section presents compelling and diverse POVs on the climate crisis. Centralizing one late-night show isn’t the answer, because no one show can encompass all points of view. We need a mutual highlighting of all the different people doing this work, a focus on the most vulnerable communities, and a seat at the table and more importantly an equal voice for those communities. This requires the TV/film industry and the climate change think tanks/organizations to invest in voices outside of the same seven people of no color who do not live with the effects of the crisis (pollution, poor air quality, famine, sea level rises, constant flooding, residing in hurricane disaster zones, etc.) providing a solitary voice. Guess what, TV Exec? Everyone in your target demo needs this information about the climate crisis so invest, invest, invest! Invest in all voices from queer people, to BIPOC folks, to people living outside of “the West” and people living on reservations, from older conservationists to younger ones—especially that last part.

Nurture New Voices Like You Work for American Idol

One way to invest in new voices: support and create more programs that welcome people into the social impact entertainment space and provide networking opportunities. The IllumiNative Producers Program (IllumiNative, n.d.), the Yes, And Laughter Lab, and Inside the Greenhouse are good examples. After-school writing and performance programs for underserved youth, like Story Pirates Changemakers and Superhero Clubhouse’s Big Green Theater, are also key (Story Pirates, n.d.; Superhero Clubhouse, n.d.). And those of us who know about those programs need to make sure everyone else does, too. (ATTN comedians: share info!) We need projects like a movie about New York’s Black food justice advocates (Thomas et al., 2019), a stand-up special featuring comics from Miami’s climate-gentrifying Little Haiti (PBS, 2022), and a half-hour comedy about farmers in the Brazilian Amazon transitioning to chop-and-mulch agriculture thanks to a fictionalized version of Projeto Tipitamba (Embrapa, 2020). If any of that’s going to happen, people from those communities need to be at the helm, making decisions from conception to launch. So let’s keep building out the infrastructure that gets them to the table and makes the table a safe place to be.

Remember: There’s Life Beyond Satire

When most people think of climate change comedy, they probably think of satire: late-night satirical news shows, Don’t Look Up, articles from The Onion like “Optimistic Researchers Say There Still Time to Head Off Climate Change Before It Starts Killing Rich People” (The Onion, 2021). Satire is a key piece of the puzzle (it punches up with great force!), but it’s not a one-size-fits-all answer to engaging people. Research has shown it’s good at getting people who care less about climate change to sit up and pay attention (Anderson & Becker, 2018), increasing their certainty that it’s happening (Brewer & McKnight, 2017). On the other hand, the people who are getting lampooned might mistake you for one of them (it’s more common than you’d think), and your words could end up reinforcing their views (Lamarre et al., 2009; Garrett et al., 2019). They might also dig their heels in more in response to being the butt of the joke (Borum & Feldman, 2020, p. 65). That is, if they even tune in at all (Mitchell et al., 2014, as cited in Borum & Feldman, 2020, p. 65). Also, sometimes people are just looking for more of an escape from reality, or they could use some hope (Osnes et al., 2019), or they just wanna see vampires make out or whatever. So if we want this movement to have maximum comedy reach, we need a whole charcuterie board of different offerings. That means scripted episodic TV, stand-up, sketch comedy, comedic documentaries (Borum & Feldman, 2020, p. 79), musical comedy, reality TV, podcasts hosted by comedians, live shows that convert investigative journalism into stand-up or scientist monologues into improv (Borum & Green-Barber, 2018; Thank You, Robot, 2019), funny journal articles, and everything else we can dream up. Climate stuff doesn’t always have to be front and center, it just has to be part of each project’s world in a meaningful way. In fact, it would probably be wise for some projects to avoid the word “climate” altogether and stick to “clean air and water” language, too (Boykoff, 2019, p. 38).

Make That Mood Board for the Just Transition

Humanity’s current mood re: the climate crisis is not good, which makes sense. There’s a lot to grieve. We know what we don’t want, and we can see it very clearly because it’s coming, but while we keep an eye on that, we also need to rally around a clear vision of what we DO want.

And that is climate justice and a complete overhaul of our relationship with this planet, with each other, with materialism, with capitalism, with food, fashion, technology, etc. There are a lot of experts who, all together, know the details of how we can get there and what it will look like. Comedy programming (and other art) can help the rest of us wrap our brains around that. So let’s make that mood board like Thimali Kodikara advised. How will this new paradigm improve the lives of families in 2065, for example? A sitcom could show us. What kinds of health problems will completely disappear from hospitals? We bring you: Season 53 of Grey’s Anatomy. How universal and robust will mutual aid be? How will island communities find a way forward? How will we dismantle white supremacy and capitalism? What new classes will be required in schools? Will every city block have a huge community garden in the middle, shared across all the backyards? Which countries will former fossil fuel execs have tried to flee to, only to be found and brought to justice, and what will that justice look like? Will we even have countries?!

Shared visualization actually helps make change. For example, in 2014, conversations about clean water and alternatives to extractive industry united an Appalachian community at an art festival. The next time “land men” tried to purchase their land to sell to energy companies, more residents were prepared to say no, and they organized for the long term (Helicon, 2018). The future they had in mind was more appealing than what the land men offered. To quote Mary Annaïse Heglar quoting writer Toni Cade Bambara: “The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible” (2020).

Invest in The Future, Even If They’re Roasting You

Youth are inheriting the world. What’s scarier? They are making fun of us while doing it. Even spookier?! They’re good at it and they’re almost always right. Even more Hocus-y and Pocus-y?!!⁵³ Not enough people are taking them seriously.⁵⁴

Times change. Media changes. The way we consume media changes. While the youth audience seems to be a perpetually vexing market for older generations to understand in order to platform, one immutable truth is that they will be here when older generations will not be. TV and film may or may not be the best vehicle to get that crucial climate information to that population but you know what? They’re already doing it without any of our help.

Millions of teens use social media daily to share information. They already have chosen the climate crisis as a priority threat amidst all the other social traumas they dissect, lampoon, roast, sing about, rap about, dance about, throw soup cans at, etc. Systemically they don’t have power, but their influence has immense worth when it comes to communication regarding adapting to the current crisis, cutting down emissions, etc. I mean, these mfs were using TikTok to get tickets to rallies so actual attendees would show up to an empty stadium (Lorenz et al., 2020). You understand how petty, nay, how powerful that is? Don’t you want that power on your side?! Infuse that youthful raw talent and motivation with the messaging and creativity and we got us one hell of an effective communication method that informs the community when they’re actually babies and not just acting like one.⁵⁵ Additionally, Gen Z should be hired to run all transmedia for the entertainment-education people (callback!!!⁵⁶).

Make Comedy a More Accessible Tool

We need more guidance and support for non-comedians who want to integrate comedy into their climate justice work. The vast majority of organizers, teachers, health professionals, social workers, nonprofits, communicators, etc., do not have access to boundary organizations who can advise them and/or connect them to entertainment professionals. They’re on their own, and they might be too nervous to just start throwing spaghetti at the wall, jokes-wise, until they “find their brand.”

So what’s the answer? Can we somehow “Oprah’s Favorite Things” boundary organizations? (“And you get a boundary organization! And YOU get a boundary organization!”) Sounds great, but expensive and time-consuming. Maybe we could make people check out the special humor issue of the journal Environmental Education Research that came out in summer 2022—the call for papers alone cited enough research on humor in education about “thorny issues” to make your head spin (Chandler et al., 2022). Maybe we could make everyone check out The Good Energy Project’s screenwriter playbook (The Good Energy Project, n.d.). Or maybe we could distribute PDFs with comedy communication tips across the internet, but require a password and not give it to the bad guys?? Respectfully requesting that you conduct research into that yourself, because these authors are TIRED. We’ve worked hard to alert you to dozens of inspiring examples of climate comedy projects in the results section, so go forth and check those out ASAP. We’re clocking out, dammit!

Conclusion

Look at y’all, you made it here! Either you had a good time or you had an amazing time! Or maybe you also just took a nap. Regardless, the aim of this experiment was to ask if comedy is an effective way to Trojan horse climate crisis education to the world.⁵⁷ That hypothesis was supported by all the talented and wonderful comedic climate communicators that we rustled up. While it is a massive undertaking to inform the world of all the ins-and-outs surrounding the crisis, our investigation found that many people laced up their Gore-Tex boots and are already tackling this inconvenient (and impending) truth.

Comedy is subjective. And when the subject of said comedy is a global crisis powered by decades of exponentially rising CO2 levels, apathetic politicians with toothless promises, and corporations facing no accountability and attempting to shift the blame to the people?? Well, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But the artists who dive in, sift through the data, find the truth, and make it their mission, nay, their civic duty, nay on that nay, their PURPOSE to shine a comedic light on this hefty hefty hefty dilemma deserve a bigger platform, more space and time to share, and a tip of the hat for their contributions. Facts and figures are not everyone’s love language, but we all can use a laugh. Something that tempers the social anxiety surrounding climate change with something soft, sweet like a spoonful of sugar, which, as a famous English child endangerer once said, helps the medicine go down (Poppins, 1965).

Additional deeper investigations into all the nooks and crannies of the comedy, TV, and film would build upon this experiment and illuminate more alternative methods of climate communication from even more people. Tackling the climate crisis as a fully backed primetime initiative, agreed upon by all networks, targeting the demos of each outlet would be a way to hit as many targets as possible. Peppa Pig, Rachel Maddow, Zendaya, Larry David, and RuPaul all talking about the Green New Deal? Can you imagine?! It’s really an achievable goal. One step in the right direction would be admiring and hiring the brilliant communicators discovered in this chapter—and keeping an eye out for the new ones popping up constantly, Whac-A-Mole style. In the words of our wise editors, which we’re too lazy to paraphrase: “Let’s keep deepening engagement through a range of comedy at the local, national and international levels.” Boom.

Thank You

…to all the creators we mentioned, as well as everyone who provided feedback on drafts of this chapter—especially Caty Borum, Lauren Feldman, Rollie Williams, Bartees Cox, Patrick David Chandler, and of course our two editors, Hua Wang and Emily Coren. We could not have done it without you! (Well, we COULD have, but it would have been worse. Radical honesty.)