Climate Comedy

Climate Comedy

Cimate Comedy

Why climate comedy?

Created by Beth Osnes, SPIKE Faculty Associate Director for Student Engagement, and Max Boykoff, Faculty Executive Director, through the Inside the Greenhouse initiative, Climate Comedy uses humor as a tool to engage audiences in conversations around climate change, sustainability, and collective action. What began as a small production with a modest budget has grown into a nationally recognized program that brings together professional comedians, science communicators, and students to explore serious environmental issues through laughter. By combining comedy with climate communication, the program creates a shared experience that helps audiences process feelings of fear, guilt, and hopelessness surrounding the climate crisis in a way that feels accessible, hopeful, and action-oriented.

Climate Comedy continues to empower students to creatively communicate sustainability issues through performance, storytelling, and collaboration. Student performers write and present original sketches and stand-up routines that tackle topics like carbon emissions, climate anxiety, renewable energy, and environmental culture with wit and authenticity. The program fosters innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability leadership while helping students build confidence, communication skills, and community through creative expression.

Papers

This report explores the use of good-natured comedy to diversify the modes of comedy that can be used in climate communication beyond satire to others modes that are possibly more supportive of sustained climate action. Research findings suggest that student participation in creating good-natured comedy helps students positively process negative
emotions regarding global warming, sustain hope, and grow as communicators of climate. 

Why fuse climate change and comedy? Humor and comedy have been increasingly mobilized as culturally-resonant vehicles for effective climate change communications, as everyday forms of resistance and tools of social movements, while providing some levity along the way. We find that progress is made along key themes of awareness, efficacy, feeling/emotion/affect, engagement/problem solving, learning and new knowledge formation, though many challenges still remain. While science is often privileged as the dominant way by which climate change is articulated, comedic approaches can influence how meanings course through the veins of our social body, shaping our coping and survival
practices in contemporary life. However, this is not a given. By tapping into these complementary ways of knowing, ongoing challenges remain regarding how
communicators can more effectively develop strategies to ‘meet people where they are’ through creative climate communications