Global warming isn't funny -- except in the hands of these comedians

BURBANK, Calif. (AP) — Esteban Gast remembered a feeling of shame he had in high school while calculating how much carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change, his daily activities created, known as a carbon footprint.

“Have you ever driven a car or flown in an airplane?” were among the long list of questions posed by the calculator.

Unspooling his story in the middle of his set at Flappers Comedy Club in Burbank, Calif., Gast pivoted quickly to describe for the crowd how oil and gas giant BP popularized the idea of tracking individual emissions. That, he said, was aimed at shifting responsibility for climate change from the companies that produce oil, gas and coal, which when burned heat the planet, to people.

“That’s like your friend who is addicted to cocaine telling you not to have a latte,” he said. The audience roared with laughter.

Gast continued: “BP, famous for spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico, was like, ‘Hey, Esteban, do you ever drive?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know, sometimes.’ And they’re just like pouring oil into a turtle’s mouth.”

Gast is among a growing group of comedians using humor to raise awareness of climate change. On the stage, online and in classrooms, they tell jokes to tackle topics such as a major U.S. climate law passed in 2022, called the Inflation Reduction Act, fossil fuel industries and convey information about the benefits of plant-based diets that emit less planet-warming emissions. They hope to educate people about the climate crisis, relieve anxiety with laughter and provide hope. And although the impacts of climate change are deadly and devastating, experts say using humor to talk climate is an important part of the larger ecosystem of how it's communicated.

Comedian Brad Einstein thinks of it this way: “How do we look that horror in the eyes and let it look back at us and then give it a little wink?”

Raising awareness

In Rasheda Crockett’s YouTube comedy series “Might Could,” the actor-comedian blends humor with information about climate change. In one video, she quips about the environmental benefits of plant-based diets while begging food scientists to make vegan cheese that actually melts.

“I'm now requesting all vegans who care about the planet to make melting vegan cheese their number one priority,” she quipped. “Because that's what's going to make veganism more viable. It's the change we have to cheese.”

Her interest in writing climate humor is also deeply personal. As a Black woman, she knows that global warming disproportionately hurts Black and other non-white communities.

“This is just another instance where people of color are going to be adversely impacted first by a disaster," said Crockett, a 2023 fellow in the Climate Comedy Cohort, a program Gast co-founded that brings together climate experts and comedians. "The Earth is warming up like the inside of a Hot Pocket ... and I just want people to care.”

Surveys show that many people do. A 2023 poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 64% of U.S. adults said they’d recently experienced extreme weather and believed it was caused at least partially by climate change. And about 65% said that climate change will have or already has had a big impact in their lifetime.

Humor can bridge the gap between the technical world of climate science and policy and the average person, Gast said. And he thinks comedians are among the “unlikely” messengers who can do that.

“We need someone talking about science, and then we need someone who doesn’t even mention science and just mentions a dope sunset for surfers," he said.

Comedy as a salve

At the University of Colorado in Boulder, climate comedy is a longtime tradition.

For the past 13 years, professors Beth Osnes-Stoedefalke and Maxwell Boykoff have taught a creative climate communication course on how information about climate issues and solutions can be conveyed creatively. Sometimes they work on their own sketch comedy or standup they later perform at the annual “Stand Up for Climate Comedy." It's the kind of event the professors help encourage elsewhere, including the show Gast performed at.

Several years ago, the professors decided to use their students and event attendees as case studies to learn about the effects of merging climate information with comedy. Among their findings were that climate comedy increased people's awareness of and engagement with the issue and reduced their climate anxiety.

Numerous other studies have also shown that humor reduces stress, depression and anxiety. One study from 2021 found that humor helped people remember political information and made it likelier they’d share it with others.

“You can’t just stack up all the IPCC reports and hope that people get it,” said Boykoff, an environmental studies professor, referencing the United Nations’ scientific papers on global climate impacts. “You got to find these creative spaces.”

Theater professor Osnes-Stoedefalke said humor also has the power to exploit cracks in bad arguments and draw nuance from them. But perhaps more important, it can give people hope.

Climate comedy “helped give this feeling of constructive hope," she said, "and without hope, action doesn't make sense.”

Making sense of the moment

Climate can also be used to reflect on the politics of anything given time.

Bianca Calderon, a master's student in environmental policy and renewable energy, is taking the creative climate communications class, where she's writing a standup bit about grant proposals. In the piece, she realizes she needs to rewrite her grant summary to omit words like “diversity," “community” and “clean energy” to comply with the Trump administration's directives.

But there's a big problem: She's seeking federal funding for research on engaging diverse communities and getting them into the clean energy job market. “At the end of it, it’s like, ‘Oh, I actually don’t have any words to use because none of them are allowed,” she said, adding that the piece is based on her actual experience applying for funding.

Einstein, the comedian and a two-time National Park Service artist-in-residence, is also using humor to talk about the administration's actions. Using a pine cone as a microphone, Einstein has been posting social media videos about the recent mass layoffs of park service employees. The online response is unlike anything he's ever received on the internet, he said.

“We need an informed citizenry that can can critique the messaging coming to them,” said Osnes-Stoedefalke. “And I think comedy can achieve that in a way that no others can, in a way that holds people’s attention.”

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