Faced with alarmist messages about the environment, which can confine one to a spiral of guilt, anxiety and weariness, laughter has emerged as a new means to talk about the planet and the challenges it faces.
A study carried out by Ifop for the Foundation de France, conducted at the end of September, reveals that 90% of young people are worried about climate change. But humour and laughter connect people, especially youngsters, enabling new ways of thinking about and acting on issues that are deadly serious.
From dark humour and sarcasm to self-deprecation, users are getting creative when it comes to thinking up jokes about the state of the planet, environmental policy, and climate skepticism.
In one TikTok video, a young man called Malik walks in the snow, ironically riffing on the fact that snow might not exist in the future – all set to a 2010s musical soundtrack of Kesha’s “Die Young”.
“Imagine trying to explain ‘snow’ to our grandchildren… they’ll never believe it existed. They’ll be too busy dying from global warming,” explains Malik. The video has 364,000 likes and counting.
Addressing climate change with humour is not entirely new. In the United States, television has been doing this for a while, notably via its late shows.
On the internet, the “Funny or Die” website, founded in part by actor Will Ferrell, shared a skit on climate change denial several years ago, featuring elderly people refusing to see the real state of the planet.
Then there’s the famous speech by former US president Barack Obama, given in 2015 at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
The politician took an ironic stance in the face of climate-change denial with the help of his “anger translator”, comedian Keegan-Michael Key, who joked: “Hey, listen y’all, if you haven’t noticed, California is bone dry, it looks like a trailer for the new ‘Mad Max’ movie up in there.”
But does the message still get across when it’s delivered with laughs?
“Rather than ‘dumbing down’ science for the public, [using humour] is a ‘smartening-up’ approach that has been shown to bring people together around a highly divisive topic,” explains Max Boykoff from the University of Colorado Boulder in an article on “The Conversation”.
“Largely gloomy approaches and interpretations typically stifle audiences rather than inspiring them to take action.”
The best medicine?
In the age of the smartphone, social networks have taken over with memes. Numerous images, hijacked in the form of zany montages, are effectively used to talk about environmental issues in a less dramatic way.
Take, for example, the many memes that arose from the COP 27 climate conference about the plane trips taken by global leaders.
In a different style, the account of TikToker Oli Frost, followed by more than 80,000 users, pokes fun at climate-related conspiracy theories through comedy songs.
“Of course, climate change is a conspiracy made up by socialist vampires,” he sings in one of his tunes. It’s certainly an unusual way to raise a laugh, but at least it stops everyone from crying.