can you laugh at climate change?

why humor is the only renewable resource

This is my seventh attempt to write this newsletter. The truth is, I don’t know what to say. I spent the last month traveling a lot and seeing friends. Then, crying about the election. Then crying about the election with friends. Then, channeling my angst into online debates with strangers. Then, releasing all of my anger on the dancefloor, on the yoga mat, and on the stained couch from which I now write.

Weeks ago on an anxiety-induced spending binge (IYKYK) I bought a few vinyl records. For those curious, the teenage-hipster-turned-cultured-adult evolution ends with the purchase of a vinyl record player. I found a record of Richard Pryor’s stand-up special “Wanted/Live in Concert” from 1978 that I initially approached with trepidation.

Given Pryor's problematic behavior, this isn't the kind of record I would typically pick up. But a track simply titled "Nature" caught my eye, drawing me in with its unexpected premise.

For the next several minutes, Pryor offers observations on wilderness survival—essentially boiling down to "Be cool, man"—including a spot-on impression of a deer being hunted. His is the kind of low-brow humor that would have little audience today.

Yet beneath the comedy, there was something profound: an instinctual desire to laugh through despair and a desperate longing for this country to embody its idealized values. I was drawn to how Pryor made sense of the 1970s—a time eerily similar to our own, riddled with systemic racism and growing economic inequality.

It sparked a fundamental question: How do you find humor in the most shadowy parts of our human experience, especially given the dire state of our planet?

It’s the same question I wrestled with last December and in the months since, writing about the joy and peril of zero-waste living, and why Americans struggle to downsize.

Here's a weird scientific plot twist: Humor isn't just a coping mechanism. It's a powerful communication tool. Research shows that comedy activates our brain's reward centers, reducing psychological defensiveness and making audiences more receptive to challenging information.

A well-crafted joke can do what a thousand serious documentaries cannot.

In search of more answers, I turned to the Climate Comedy Cohort: a growing wave of comedians using humor to inspire climate action, one heat pump joke at a time. Here’s what this intrepid group had to say about twisting the “doom and gloom” narrative on its head.

David Perdue, Stand up Comedian, Actor, and Podcaster

I would love to be boring. But humor is rooted in my DNA as a Black person and as a Southerner. One of my favorite climate jokes I wrote is: “It’s weird that America’s not into solar. It’s like free labor. That’s how America was founded. We have to start telling people the sun is Black.” These jokes are usually delivered in a room full of White people who are very uncomfortable. That’s my type of room.

Rasheda Crockett, Actor, Writer, and Producer

I was so excited to tell my mom I was writing jokes about climate change. But when I did, she said “Sheda ain’t sh*t funny about climate change.” And, she’s right. But it’s like Robert Mack says, we need to stop thinking about it as ‘doom and gloom’ and more as ‘doom and BLOOM.’”

Esteban Gast, Comedian-in-Residence at Generation180

Most successful comedy tackles very heavy topics. To me, it's the perfect vehicle for talking about climate change. People are really baffled at climate joke writing, but once you know more about climate, it's easy to write a joke. Like when you find out that the “carbon footprint” concept was created by fossil fuel companies, you could right ten minutes of comedy from that alone.

Mark Kendall, Co-founder of CoolCoolCool Productions

Good comedy is all about making the unexpected choice, and climate change really lends itself to that. There are a bunch of surprising ways to talk about the climate in an optimistic way. And we can use that to arm people with climate information.

If you found yourself laughing—even just a little—step further inside the world of climate comedy and know that if we can laugh in the face of rising sea levels, we can also organize. We can collaborate. We can create. We can fight back.

And maybe, just maybe, we’ll make those fossil fuel CEO’s wish they chose a less roastable profession.

More Funny Bits:

• Subscribe to Generation180’s newsletter to get their “Friday Funny”

• Climate Translator: Funny explanations of climate concepts

• Comedians Conquering Climate Change: Podcast where Esteban Gast chats with fellow comedians about their efforts to single-handedly save the planet

• Climate Denier’s Playbook: Rollie Williams (Climate Town) and Nicole Conlan (The Daily Show) are two comedians dismantling climate misinformation

• 17 well-known comedians attempt to make climate change even funnier