What’s so funny about climate change?

“The publicity department is having a hard time getting a handle on how to promote a comedy about the destruction of the planet.”

The people tasked with marketing the 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove” didn't know quite what to make of it. But audiences did. What they saw was a dark parable that also managed to be funny enough to help them swallow some hard truths about a nuclear arms race that, by that point, had gotten well out of hand.

Relax a mind with comedy, the theory goes, and it becomes more receptive to a serious story.

How’s this for serious: last year was the warmest on record, by far.

It also saw a flourish of efforts to break down willful resistance to science with climate-themed comedy. Yellow Dot Studios emerged in the US, courtesy of a prominent Hollywood director, taking its place alongside New York-based Climate Town, Politically Aweh in South Africa, Climate Science Breakthrough in the UK, and others applying humour to grim circumstances.

For Max Boykoff and Beth Osnes, this is familiar territory. The colleagues at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the US recently spoke with the Forum’s Radio Davos podcast about how they’ve been immersing students in the use of comedy to communicate the realities of climate change for about a decade now, and studying the results. Their findings point to a happy conclusion. “This can help break down defenses,” Boykoff said. “This can help us come together.”

Boykoff, a professor of environmental studies who has contributed to the benchmark reports published regularly by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said establishing the science is essential. But, “we also know that it’s not enough.”

For Osnes, a professor of both environmental studies and theatre, this isn’t surprising. Motivating people is “much more in the emotional realm than it is in the cognitive,” she said.

“Comedy can enhance awareness,” Boykoff added. “It can enhance one’s sense of efficacy.”

The Osnes translation: “Laughter is a loosening, it’s like a vibration… that’s why it’s so weird and magical.”

A lot of climate-themed comedy comes in the form of a straight-man act. It’s the underlying structure of videos produced by Climate Science Breakthrough, which match comics with climate scientists (the project was co-created by members of the Forum’s Earth Decides community, and the Forum has explored other ways of communicating climate realities through humour).

Rising sea levels will “create hundreds of millions of refugees,” a scientist explains in one Climate Science Breakthrough video; a comedian responds with withering sarcasm that this “shouldn’t cause any international political issues.” Another cuts from a scientist detailing the impact of extreme heat on the human body to his comedian counterpart clutching her head in silence; it’s maybe the only possible punchline.

A video published in January by Yellow Dot Studios uses the same structure. Tim Robinson, a comedian recognizable from his own Netflix show (or “Saturday Night Live” before that), is willing to listen to a scientist deliver his sobering assessment of climate impacts – but only after the scientist puts on a ridiculous shirt.

Comedy always risks coming off as insipid. It’s the risk-taking that can make it mesmerizing. Tapping into that power to address trauma isn’t exactly new.

Osnes likes to point to the Lysistrata, an ancient Greek comedy staged in the midst of long and destructive war, as an early example of confronting crisis with farce.

A couple of millennia later it was a Nazi prison camp’s turn. “Hogan's Heroes” was a screwball TV comedy set in a fictional Stalag 13 that aired in the US for six seasons. Just a couple of decades prior, the actor playing Corporal Lebeau had survived actual Nazi concentration camps. The series was a send-up of militarism that resonated, at a time when the American military was bogged down in Viet Nam.

Now, at a time when breaking heat records has become a regular occurrence, climate change-focused comedy is proliferating. “We are at an inflection point,” Boykoff said.

That’s spurred even more interest in the class he teaches with Osnes, aimed at deepening our understanding of how climate change issues can be communicated. It culminates with a comedy performance in a large concert hall, where any student mustering enough courage to get up on stage has already succeeded (laughs are a bonus). Professional supervision is at hand; Chuck Nice, a comedian who co-hosts StarTalk with celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, has regularly MC’d.

The class is designed to create more effective climate communicators, whether in front of an audience or in potentially awkward dinner-table conversation. At a particularly politically fraught point in time, comedy could be an effective means to overcome the divides that tend to hinder climate action, Boykoff said.

In 2022, as global surface temperatures crept closer to an unsettling point of departure, the Pew Research Center asked people in 19 countries if they considered climate change to be a major threat. In 14 of those countries, there was a clear difference in how people on the political left viewed the issue compared with those on the right (85% of respondents on the left in the US said it was a major threat, but just 22% on the right felt the same).

Nuclear weapons have also played a politically polarizing role over the years – yet more proof that vastly different lessons can be drawn from the same crisis.

Stanley Kubrick, the director of “Dr. Strangelove,” initially conceived of his nuclear war-themed film as a serious drama, before realizing that “the only way to tell the story was as a black comedy.” At its heart was a command-and-control system that really did enable US military officers to launch a cataclysmic attack on their own. The director had studied the topic for years; most people knew nothing about it, and the few who did seemed to accept its implications.

Explaining why this was a bad idea in dry detail was one option. It probably wouldn’t have gotten as many people to pay attention (“Dr. Strangelove” was made for $1.8 million, and earned more than $9 million at the box office).

The best way to proceed may be the same whether a self-inflicted catastrophe threatens to come all at once in the form of a mushroom cloud, or in progressively warmer stages: get the facts right first, and let the comedy follow.

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