Greens have brought much laughter to the world, but most of it has been at their expense. The British comedian Marcus Brigstocke says he struggles with this problem on a daily basis, more so since he increased his riffs on global warming in his routines following his Arctic voyage last year with Cape Farewell, an organization that brings together artists and scientists to raise awareness of climate change.
"It's far and away the most difficult comedy subject I've ever dealt with," he says. "It's tested me to the outer reaches of my ability as a writer."
Brigstocke is one of a small, but growing number of comedians trying to wrestle some humor from climate change. Fellow British comic Rob Newman has been a committed environmental and political campaigner for many years. Recently he was at Hebden Bridge, northern England, doing stand-up at the town's monthly Climate Chaos Kitchen on the subjects of peak oil and climate change.
Briton Mark Watson has gone one further. Last September he was the only stand-up comedian among a group of 150 volunteers in Melbourne who attended former US vice president Al Gore's workshop in which the Nobel peace laureate teaches others how to present his An Inconvenient Truth lecture. The result was Mark Watson's Earth Summit - Gore's famous slide show, but with jokes delivered in Watson's trademark rambling style.
The idea of education through entertainment is not new, and the environmental movement - in the US at least - has had its share of satirists, from Henry David Thoreau to Edward Abbey. The latter's furious but funny novel The Monkey Wrench Gang encouraged direct action groups such as Earth First!, which in turn inspired the UK roads protests of the early 1990s. But this was a single issue, a relatively simple conflict. Climate change is different.
"It's such a massive subject," says Tim Britton, director of the multi-disciplinary comedy troupe Forkbeard Fantasy. "The potential disaster we face is so huge and there is such an enormous amount of information."
Britton and his team had more than three decades of success behind them when, in 2006, they entered and won the British Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) Climate Challenge, an award aimed at changing public attitudes to tackling climate change. With this funding in place, Forkbeard Fantasy worked with corporate consciousness-raisers CarbonSense to create Invisible Bonfires, a multimedia cabaret night presented as a parody of the Gore-style climate change conference.
At first, though, audiences were skeptical.
"When we opened," Britton says, "there was a lot of cynicism, with people saying, 'Oh, global warming's all a government scam. You're just jumping on the bandwagon.' A year later there was total acceptance of the basic ideas."
Brigstocke tells a slightly different story. A comic who thrives on confrontation, he took on all three Abrahamic religions in a seven-minute rant for BBC radio's The Now Show last year, bracing himself for a violent reaction that never came.
"I had one or two e-mails saying: 'You're an idiot, you don't know what you're talking about,' but when I did the piece on climate change I received lots of very, very angry e-mails protesting that the whole thing is a lie and a conspiracy. Now that I'm known as an environmentalist, the attacks are, if anything, getting angrier and more personal."
He believes that this resistance, rather than weak material, lies behind the climate comedian's travails.
"There are lots of targets," he says. "Lots of behaviors to be mocked."
A gentler kind of self-deprecating humor pervades both The Transition Handbook and the approach of its author, Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Town movement which shows communities how to adapt for the post-oil age. He tells a story in which he's at the pub, talking to an old countryman about the concept of peak oil. He really thinks he's getting his point across until the old man brings the conversation to a close with a flourish: "Yes, I used some of that on a table once - came up lovely."
Meanwhile, Watson's forthcoming book Crap at the Environment is a variation on the now familiar theme of ordinary-person-tries-to-green-up. Deliberately distancing himself from those "eco-warriors with smallholdings in the country," Watson promises us amateur environmentalism presented "with all the ardor and none of the smugness of the most greener-than-thou devotee."
Perhaps the toughest challenge facing the climate comedian is public wariness of humor with a message, which Brigstocke finds even among other comedians he works with. So what is a comic to do?
"With my Arctic trip I tell it as a story, really focusing on my complete inability to cope with life at sea," he says. "So I'll be talking about being seasick and throwing up all over the place, and then while people are laughing I'll shove a bit of science under their chair. I'll describe what it was like falling out of my bunk because of the motion of the ship, and then mention that, 'Oh, by the way, the salinity levels in the Arctic are far worse than we had imagined. And the temperatures are much higher.'"
US President Donald Trump has gotten off to a head-spinning start in his foreign policy. He has pressured Denmark to cede Greenland to the United States, threatened to take over the Panama Canal, urged Canada to become the 51st US state, unilaterally renamed the Gulf of Mexico to “the Gulf of America” and announced plans for the United States to annex and administer Gaza. He has imposed and then suspended 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico for their roles in the flow of fentanyl into the United States, while at the same time increasing tariffs on China by 10
With the manipulations of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), it is no surprise that this year’s budget plan would make government operations difficult. The KMT and the TPP passing malicious legislation in the past year has caused public ire to accumulate, with the pressure about to erupt like a volcano. Civic groups have successively backed recall petition drives and public consensus has reached a fever-pitch, with no let up during the long Lunar New Year holiday. The ire has even breached the mindsets of former staunch KMT and TPP supporters. Most Taiwanese have vowed to use
As an American living in Taiwan, I have to confess how impressed I have been over the years by the Chinese Communist Party’s wholehearted embrace of high-speed rail and electric vehicles, and this at a time when my own democratic country has chosen a leader openly committed to doing everything in his power to put obstacles in the way of sustainable energy across the board — and democracy to boot. It really does make me wonder: “Are those of us right who hold that democracy is the right way to go?” Has Taiwan made the wrong choice? Many in China obviously
About 6.1 million couples tied the knot last year, down from 7.28 million in 2023 — a drop of more than 20 percent, data from the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs showed. That is more serious than the precipitous drop of 12.2 percent in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the saying goes, a single leaf reveals an entire autumn. The decline in marriages reveals problems in China’s economic development, painting a dismal picture of the nation’s future. A giant question mark hangs over economic data that Beijing releases due to a lack of clarity, freedom of the press
RSS