No laughing matter: Can comedy help us tackle climate change?

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Ben Stasny, comedy event host: Alright, hello, hello, hello Boulder Theatre. Wow, nice crowd!

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week we head to the comedy club. Know any good jokes about climate change?

Chuck Nice, comedian: The Arctic is on fire routinely now. The Arctic. You know what? Now, when a kid asks, is there a Santa Claus? You can say, well, there used to be.

Robin Pomeroy: It’s a serious issue, but can comedy help us cope with - and communicate about - climate change? These university professors think so.

Max Boykoff, Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder: Supporting these many ways, many pathways of communicating to meet people where they are, to resonate, to spark greater engagement and action.

Robin Pomeroy: This university in the US runs a course teaching students how to make comedy about climate change - and puts them on stage to perform.

Beth Osnes, Professor, Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder: I think that we're on to something. And I think it's been confirmed by the amount of uptake in climate comedy.

Robin Pomeroy: We’ll hear about that and also about the World Economic Forum’s ‘cartoonathon’.

Gill Einhorn, Head, Innovation and Transformation, Centre for Nature and Climate, World Economic Forum: Laughter is a really interesting approach because it alleviates stress, depression and anxiety. We're able to overcome things a lot more quickly through the mechanism of laughter.

Robin Pomeroy: Subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts, or visit wef.ch/podcasts where you will also find our sister programmes, Meet the Leader and Agenda Dialogues.

I’m Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum, and with this look at climate change and comedy.

Beth Osnes: It's not that dangerous, you know, at the end of the day it was a joke. And it has a lot of potential to get people thinking.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos

Welcome to Radio Davos where we're talking climate change and comedy. Joining me are two colleagues. The first one is John Letzing, who's a digital editor at a part of the World Economic Forum called Strategic Intelligence.

Hi, John. How are you?

John Letzing: I'm very good. Thanks, Robin.

Robin Pomeroy: What's Strategic Intelligence, for anyone who doesn't know?

John Letzing: It's a essentially a tool for contextual analysis that enables a much deeper dive on a broader range of topics, everything from artificial intelligence to Zimbabwe. And it's available at intelligence.weforum.org.

Robin Pomeroy: Also joining us is Gill Einhorn. Hi Gill. How are you?

Gill Einhorn: Good to see you, Robin.

Robin Pomeroy: Good to see you. It says here you are head of Innovation and Transformation, Global Collaboration at the Forum Centre for Nature and Climate. Is that correct?

Gill Einhorn: That is.

Robin Pomeroy: That's a mouthful. You do loads of interesting work on nature and climate at the part of the World Economic Forum that talks about nature and climate.

Gill Einhorn: That's right. My function is, basically R&D. So how can we have a sense of what's on the horizon that we need to be looking at, and how do we help ensure that we're bringing everyone along? So ensuring stakeholders from around the world are engaged appropriately in our work, be they from grassroots communities in far flung locations, to academic institutions.

Robin Pomeroy: So Nature and Climate, climate change, such a massive issue. And you're involved in that 24/7 really Gill. John and I do a lot of stuff on it, right, John?. But today we are going a bit left field here, talking about comedy, the role of comedy. Before we do that, I'm going to try a joke on you. Are you ready for this?

Gill Einhorn: Totally. Let's go.

Robin Pomeroy: Okay. I tried to think of one. Then I asked ChatGPT for one. It made up a joke, and it was terrible. I'm not even going to repeat it.

Gill Einhorn: That's funny in and of itself.

Robin Pomeroy: It wasn't funny at all. But then I went to another AI app, and I think what this one does, it scrapes the internet for actual stuff. So I believe this is a genuine joke, probably written by a human. So here we go. I'm just going to read it out.

'A climate scientist and a climate change denier walk into a bar. The denier says, bartender, show me your strongest whisky. The bartender says, this one here, it's 95% alcohol. The denier slams down his fist and leaves the bar in a hurry. The scientist says, you know that's the problem with these guys. You show them the proof and they still don't buy it.'

There you go. That's not bad, is it? That was the first one it threw out. The ChatGPT one does not bear repeating.

So what is comedy's role in the very serious fight against climate change? Let's ask Gill, because you've been involved to some extent in using comedy within your work at the Forum.

Gill Einhorn: Yes, absolutely, Robin.

Today we're facing existential threats from the nature and climate crisis. And, Jared Diamond wrote a book 20 years ago this year called Collapse: Why Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. And now, 20 years later, we can look back on all of his 12 indicators that show signs of collapse and unfortunately our civilisation is flashing code red.

So what happens cognitively in the brain when we are facing existential threat is one of two things. We could either end up as pessimists going, 'Existential threat. We're all dead. It's over. Trauma. Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fold.' And that leads to inaction.

And we could have the opposite: The optimist. 'Oh, it's all going to be okay. We can kick the can down the road.' And that leads to inaction.

And so there's no surprise that our civilisation is struggling to self-advocate and effectively respond, because our cognitive processing is: shut down and maintenance of the status quo.

And so laughter is a really interesting approach to dealing with that because it alleviates stress, depression and anxiety. And in the brain it produces dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins. And what that means is that we're able to overcome things a lot more quickly through the mechanism of laughter. The author Madeleine L'Engle says, 'a good laugh heals a lot of hurts', and I do believe that's true.

So what we found is that humour's an effective tool to face absurdity and paradox. And that's where we see the ability to harness that on our agenda at the World Economic Forum to move people faster into a solution space.

Robin Pomeroy: So how does an organisation like the World Economic Forum - it's not known for its gag telling - it's not obvious how the Forum would harness humour to forward its work on spurring climate action, which I suppose is really at the basis of what you're trying to do, Gill.

Gill Einhorn: In Davos this year, 2024, we launched a new community called Earth Decides. And it's a community of scientists and influencers who are looking to cultivate informed optimism. Informed, because we need to be fully informed of the current risks. Without this, we won't be able to appropriately or credibly respond. So we need that information from science and from the lived experience of people on the grassroots.

But we also need the optimism. So how do we hold that optimism with us as we're confronting those risks?

And as we were having early discussions last year about where we would want to focus first, humour was very high on the agenda. We started working with Pablo Suarez, Jemilah Mahmood and the technology of GoodGames to see how do we harness this humour mechanism to bring issues onto the agenda, which we can tackle more productively. And we experimented with the very first World Economic Forum cartoonathon.

Robin Pomeroy: What's the cartoonathon? I've seen some of these cartoons. So what did you do?

Gill Einhorn: And so we asked a group of leaders in our Sustainable Development Impact Meeting in September last year in New York, what is the elephant in the room of the nature and climate communications crisis? And we told them, we want you to rant. We want you to let everything out, just let it out into the software. So everything was anonymous. What are the top things that you want to rant about on this issue? And we gave everybody a bit of time to collect that information. And then we said to them, okay, we're now going to share with you the rants of others in a randomised way.

And everybody had the opportunity to review other people's rants and add to them. And building on that, we then said, well, let's go through all of these and prioritise. What do you give a thumb up to? What do you give a thumb down to? What are you mediocre on?

And what that generated in the system was a prioritised list of issues, which was then sent to a group of cartoon artists, real time in the session. And those cartoon artists took that information and they turned them into cartoons.

And it was extremely powerful because the cartoon artists were then able to take that collective wisdom. So it's not just the wisdom of one individual or an idea from one cartoon artist. It's the consolidated method of a group into some very targeted pieces on what the underlying elephant in the room was.

And we produced, quite a number of cartoons. I'll give you an example. You gave me a joke. I'm going to give you a cartoon. One of them was, a man standing in a field where the field had been degraded as a result of droughts. In the background, there was some dead trees, there was a fire raging, and there was a group of people that looked a little bit like refugees standing in front of him. And he had his hands up and he said, "I have a solution: Let's give up."

Robin Pomeroy: I remember that one. My favourite one - and there will be a link in the show notes to this episode where people can go and see some of these. It's tricky, Gill, describing a cartoon. I did better with a with a joke. But I'll do my best on this one. It's a bunch of businessmen, all men. in suits up to their waist in flood water, with a cityscape behind them, and one of them says to the other: "Changing paths? That's not in this quarter's budget."

And it's quite wry humour, isn't it? Because both of those examples are pretty dark in a way. But it communicates a message very quickly.

Also, cartoons are very shareable, aren't they? I imagine people are sending these around, you know, they'll become memes, some of these. Have you notice that happening at all?

Gill Einhorn: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think we've had more requests than we expected of people who are keen to use the cartoons. And the beautiful thing about this process is once they've been created, they are open access use as long as they're not for sale. And so the spirit and intent of the whole process is for them to become viral and to be used by those individuals who've been a part of creating them.

Robin Pomeroy: Let's talk to John a bit now. John, you have done the main interview for this episode. You interviewed a couple of people who run a course in climate comedy.

John Letzing: Yes. So they are colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder in the US, and they've been doing this for about a decade now. So in a certain sense, maybe a bit ahead of the curve.

One is an environmental studies professor, Max Boykoff. The other is a professor of theatre as well. And her name is Beth Osnes. And they do something that's part of a broader project called Inside the Greenhouse. And essentially they have been, teaching a course. And the end of this course is a live performance. So, a lot of these kids, who sign up for this, I think at this point they probably have been clued in. But over the years, probably many have been not so aware that this was going to be involved at the end of the course.

Robin Pomeroy: They have to get up and actually perform their jokes or their sketches in front of a crowd in an actual genuine comedy club.

John Letzing: I mean, it's a relatively sizeable venue. It's, I think, an 800 seat capacity theatre, and anyone who's gotten up in front of any size audience knows how stressful that can be.

Robin Pomeroy: Yeah. And then to tell jokes and it's really, you're putting yourself on the line, aren't you?

John Letzing: Yeah.

Robin Pomeroy: Instant feedback. Good or bad? Do you get a laugh or not?

John Letzing: Right. I mean, in a certain sense, if they've gotten themselves up there on stage, they've already won in a way. Any laughs they get are sort of icing on the cake.

Robin Pomeroy: Also, must make the point, this is not a course, you won't get a degree in climate comedy, but this is a module. As US universities always are, the undergraduates have the chance to take lots of different, modules. Right? So don't let anyone go away from this thinking what? The University of Colorado is doing an undergraduate course in climate comedy. No, these are students who will be doing physics or sociology or history or anything, right? Who have decided, I'm going to try a little bit of this.

You mentioned, John, they have this final year show. Let's hear a bit of this where they introduce the two people you were talking about.

Ben Stasny, comedy event host: Welcome, everybody. Thanks for coming out on a Monday night. We know it's getting dreary out, but it's nice and warm in here. Thanks so much. My name is Ben Stasny. I am a graduate student co-teaching a creative Climate communications on CU Boulder's campus with Doctor Beth Osnes and co-founded by doctor Max Boykoff, and I'm going to hand it over to them.

Beth Osnes: Thank you. We want you to be rest assured that it's okay, the students are going to get a grade whether you laugh or not. So just let it be authentic. It's okay.

Robin Pomeroy: So that was kind of the start of this show. It's available online. Anyone can watch the whole thing. It lasts for about an hour or so. I just thought I'd play you one of my favourite jokes from them. I can't credit her full name because she's only introduced by Taylor. But I did quite like this one.

Taylor, comedy student: For real though, I'm sick of this environmentally friendly shit. I am pissed off. I'm environmentally hostile now. And with that, I think the Lorax should have been way meaner. Don't speak for the trees. Cap them in the knees.

Robin Pomeroy: So that was Taylor with her gag about The Lorax. The show then - it's of variable quality. As I say, these aren't even drama students, right? These are kids who are learning all kinds of things. But the show is compered by professional stand up, Chuck Nice, showing the kids how it's done.

Should we hear a bit from Chuck? I may have to use my bleep, which I've never used before on Radio Davos. So here we go Chuck.

Chuck Nice: This is not about doom and gloom, but it is about actually getting people to stand up and take note.

For instance, here's something to think about, right now there is a crisis of wildfires in the Arctic. The Arctic. You know that place where Santa Claus lives? The fxxing Arctic. The Arctic is on fire routinely now. The Arctic. You know what? Now, when a kid asks, is there a Santa Claus? You can say, well, there used to be. But he died in the fire. So, I'm sorry. Timmy, you getting a last minute gift from the gas station.

Listen. Here's the deal. This show is dedicated to a critical issue and the big question surrounding it: Why did Beyoncé put out a country album? I thought climate change was trying to tell me that the world was going to end. But then I heard Beyonce singing with a twang. I was like, fxxx it, it's a rap, We are finished. It is done.

Robin Pomeroy: OK John, we're going to hear your interview now with the two people who run this course. The next voice we'll hear, John, will be your own.

John Letzing: We are at this sort of inflection point where it seems like so many more people are getting this idea of applying comedy to communicating about climate change. Have you seen that translate into greater interest in your courses there and participating in what you do with students?

Max Boykoff: Yes, I think in our case at our university, you know, I have been our department chair in Environmental Studies for three years and seen our students with an increasing readiness and an increasing appetite to engage in these spaces. The more in which they're being raised in environments where they've been hearing about this for some time and they want to apply their knowledge in productive ways and understand how they can plug in to positive change.

And I also think that they specifically do our course. You know, if we think back 12 years, when we first started offering our class, students didn't really know what they were getting themselves into.

Beth Osnes: Oh, they didn't. They thought they were literally going into a greenhouse.

Max Boykoff: Yes. That they'd be moving soil and that sort of thing.

I think they've been sharing with each other. It's become an increasingly popular class, one that gets a big waitlist. It's hard to get into it now, is that it shows that it's been an incredibly uplifting and bonding experience for them, that they carry forward, and then they want their friends and roommates and that sort of thing to also have that experience. And so we've been getting more and more students that are coming in ready to engage in these creative processes.

When I think earlier in the years, would you agree that they came in with some reluctance and some reticence about.

Beth Osnes: Oh yes, we've also proven that we know how to support students who come to us, who are not with performance experience, and we know how to support them and scaffold an experience in which they are ready to delight an audience. And that's not a small thing. So we know how to do it now.

John Letzing: And when it comes time to do these performances, like you say, in a pretty substantial venue, 800-seat venue, do the students have a lot of leeway in terms of structure? I mean, or is it pretty much, you know, you're going to do stand up or maybe sketch.

Beth Osnes: They're only offered to do stand up and sketch and we set them up for success. We scaffold experiences where they're coming up. We guide them towards being solutions-focused, but we really put it back to them.

We're not the bosses. We're not the judges of oh yes, you can use that many F-bombs or not. We put it on a platter and hold it up to the whole class and say: through our collective consideration, let's think of the risks and the possible benefits of these choices.

But we also really ask them to really engage in a lot of critical thought of like, what am I actually accomplishing with this skit? Yes, it might be funny, but what am I able to communicate through this skit?

They can use scatology or sexual innuendo in a way that really captures someone's attention, but then have they also been able to communicate, in a way, the benefits of a vegan diet on the planet, which one student from two years ago was able to do in a hilarious way.

You know, we say comedy isn't necessarily the device that can do the heaviest of lifting. Don't do more than, like, 30% climate fact conveyance through your comedy sketch, you know, like. But then I also love to say there are no rules. If I say that, the opposite may be true. A very clever comedian could just, like, kill it with an all fact-based thing then, and leaning into that.

You know, it's just the exaggeration is where you find these spaces and the fact that there are no rules, there's no guaranteed formula, that's what keeps it interesting. It's a moving target. The eras keep changing, the students keep changing. You've got to be responsive and nimble in these spaces. And that's what's so compelling.

Max Boykoff: We've been supplying them with information to help them point towards climate solutions. And so it's one thing to make people laugh, great. It's one thing to be able to even diagnose the problems that we're living in, okay. But to be able to then layer on this additional piece of pointing towards solutions, providing some guidance about ways in which we can make change and alleviate these challenges, is that added... For several years, we paired our work with Project Drawdown and helping them engage with these different solution sets to think about how to guide their comedy content for when they get up on stage.

And I will say also, this scaffolding piece is really important, that by the time that they're up on stage, yes, it is live, yes, it is in front of a fresh crowd that hadn't heard it. But in the classroom and working with professional comedians, working with other students, working with us, that we'll have heard it at least a half dozen times, we will have heard what they're working on, giving them feedback so we know where they're going. Our preparation is what leads to the success. Our being everybody involved, students, professional comedians, us helping guide the process that when they get up on stage, they know they're fully supported. They know that their work has gotten that feedback so that they feel confident up there.

Beth Osnes: And it's funny too, like we had one student who was a very likeable young man, and he wanted to do stand up, and he got up there and he was trying so hard and it just wasn't funny, you know? And he kept working at it. I worked with him. We honed it down. And you know what? He got it to the point where not only was it funny, but it was really sticky information in there that sticks with you.

And it's like comedy, like some people have a natural inclination towards it, but it's not genius. It's work. It's really hard work. And you're honing, honing, honing the language in front of a crowd, which you can do in a classroom setting over and over again. And it's work, and you can work towards it and you can achieve it.

And it's kind of liberating to know that we all have access to this, and we have to just play our own strengths and our own quirky aspects of our own behaviour and being. And it's going to be a masterpiece of each student's unique combination of who they are and how they look and how they move, how they think. It's really delightful to to see each one blossom into their comedic selves.

John Letzing: I definitely get the idea of a lack of rules being a pretty important part of comedy, but at the same time, and you've been doing this now, you say, for, it's more than a decade, right, is there something of a science to the amount of science that you can include in comedy?

Beth Osnes: I use an example with the students. I'll literally bring in a helium balloon, and then I'll have paper clips, and I'll have a little loop at the end of the string on the helium balloon and I'll say, okay, imagine that these paper clips are scientific information. The reason a helium balloon is delightful is because it floats all on its own. It's cool. And if you start putting the paperclips on the string and it hovers, that's magical. That's cool. And if you put too many paperclips, it starts to kind of pull it down a little bit.

So that's one embodied way of saying, yeah, you kind of want to balance how much you're putting on your piece. It's through repetition in front of a live audience. You can sit at a desk and analyse a piece of comedy till the cows come home, and that's not going to be anywhere near as useful as getting in front of living human beings and trying it out.

Max Boykoff: Yeah, I mean, we do integrate the different theories in the science of humour. There have been definitely people who have tried to pin down, you know, what are the ingredients to make something funny. And we've drawn on that. We've introduced our students to that. We've played with that. But I think, as Beth's indicating, is that experimentation, it's that playfulness that helps turn something from what it could be funny in text and within the sciences of humour into something that's produced live on stage.

Beth Osnes: And there are some formulas, like you set something up, you have to have a cultural context in which we're going to understand the references you're making. And then you somehow do a punchline that oftentimes is surprising. It's not what you expected. You know, we don't have to start from scratch here. We can use some of these things.

There's like the power of three. You know, like if you're creating a stand up piece, it's really easy to have a strong opinion about something. Give three reasons why that's true that are very detailed in like funny and kind of quirky in their own right and kind of like go, I, I'm recognising a social truth uniquely put. And then you give a concluding statement that hooks back into the beginning somehow, in a clever way.

That's like a pretty tried and trued way to come up with a pretty good comedic sketch that you could do for stand up. But then you can go beyond that, too. But that's like there are some things that you can rely on.

John Letzing: Do you still, though, at this point, do you ever encounter people who sort of recoil at the idea of just the very idea of laughing at climate change?

Beth Osnes: We've had grown ups leave our show upset because our students went too far and we go, oh well, they thought it was funny. So that's happened.

Max Boykoff: These are deliberate risks that we take the risks of trivialising critically important issues. And so different people interpret this in different ways.

We always try to tread carefully as we consider the politics of everyday life relative to the way in which we see things differently. But yeah, there have been people who haven't been as drawn to this as others and that's that's okay.

There is no silver bullet to this, that it is supporting up these many ways, many pathways of communicating to meet people where they are, to resonate, to spark, greater engagement and action and may not be for comedy, for everyone. And we're okay with that.

Beth Osnes: And it's also it's like we've been doing it for nine years and we've had a few grown ups leave our show and kind of go 'urgh', and like, that's okay with me. Like, they'll live, you know?

So like, we haven't caused any huge damage. And I think it's done a lot of good. So I feel like it's not that dangerous, you know, at the end of the day. It was a joke and it has a lot of potential to get people thinking.

I still think of this the time that one of my students, the one I was telling you about, that he wasn't funny to begin with, but then he got funny. He does this whole thing of like, you know, when we want to, we we want to expand the infrastructure for cars. You know, we have these meetings, we invest millions of dollars, we do their job. We, you know, do all these things. The cement trucks have to show up and, and, when we want to expand infrastructure for bicycles, we give a guy, a gallon of paint then we paint a line on the side of the road and we say to the bicyclists, good luck, you know, that's stuck with me. It's so funny because it's true. You know, like, you paint a line and you're still, like, so vulnerable on a bike next to traffic. So, like, they can find these little truths and expose them for how ridiculous they are. They exaggerated a little bit, but it still has its footing in truth.

John Letzing: Yeah. I mean, is that absurdity that you're talking about is that sort of at the core of what you're getting at?

Beth Osnes: I think part of it is one aspect, yes. You know, nobody's been shamed overly, but they're punching up at systems that are in place that we say we want people using clean energy transportation options. And yet we don't support it. And we leave these people vulnerable to cars, which is a very real thing. And if you've bike, you experience that that close proximity is frightening and dangerous. So they're exposing that.

John Letzing: Yeah. I mean maybe another historical references Doctor Strangelove, right? I mean that the idea of making a comedy out of nuclear war, on its face, kind of absurd, but maybe gets to that same element of absurdity that you're talking about.

Beth Osnes: Well, I mean, Life is Beautiful, that movie that, you know, I mean, my God, something is horrific as the Holocaust. And yet you found the humanity and that kind of tenderness within it through the comedy and that gift of father to son of coping. You know, it's a coping thing in the face of the harshness of living.

John Letzing: I mean, if you could boil it down, what is it that a person is accomplishing when they're able to actually laugh at climate change?

Beth Osnes: I think they're connecting. They're connecting with a new truth. They're connecting with each other. They're connecting with the person who is giving the joke. And it's social capital, it's connections, that give us our resilience, our strength as a society and as people.

Max Boykoff: And as we sort of indicated before bringing forth these multiple truths and ways of knowing are really helpful in sorting through how we're navigating our lives and how we can exploit then cracks in arguments, how we can see that there are things that are incongruous, that are hypocritical, that they're pretentious, they're even false narratives that we're living by. And so it's really helpful in that way.

John Letzing: Do you envision a point somewhere where you could say, okay, job well done, we did good here because communication about this topic is totally different than it was a couple of decades ago?

Max Boykoff: Yeah, I mean, I guess I had said earlier, it's a decidedly incomplete project because it's a little bit like exercise. You get fit and then know, okay, I'm done, I'm fit. Now, I like that. You got to keep going, keep maintaining. You have to keep these lines of communication open, because those are the ways in which we're going to be able to work together as a collective to understand what's going on, to help make sense of what kind of world that we want going forward. That's the way that I see it.

Beth Osnes: And it's always going to be nimble and responsive to the moment. You know, we keep crossing these thresholds. This is going to catch up with us at some point. We're going to be needing to do things that are much more dire than just communicate about climate. And we're preparing young people who are going to be nimble, responsive, have coping strategies, and that's going to be really needed given the amount of response we're actually giving the climate crisis right now. Those skills are going to be needed and we'll be ready and engaged. No matter what comes.

Robin Pomeroy: Beth Osnes of the University of Colorado, Boulder. You also her her colleague Max Boykoff. Together they run the Inside the Greenhouse comedy course.

Thanks to them and to my own colleagues, John Letzing and Gill Einhorn. You can read more about Gill's work at the Centre for Nature and Climate, and John's work at Strategic Intelligence on our website - links to that - and the Inside the Greenhouse Comedy Course - in the show notes to this podcast episode.

Please subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts and please leave us a rating or review. And join the conversation on the World Economic Forum Podcast club on Facebook.

This episode of Radio Davos was presented by me, Robin Pomeroy. Editing was by Jere Johansson. Studio production by Gareth Nolan.

We will be back next week, but for now thanks to you for listening and goodbye.