20 hours Ago
April is International Humor Month. This began with a national initiative in the U.S.
in 1976 to promote the therapeutic benefits of comedy and humor. It was then taken internationally by the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor to utilize the power of laughter for our mental and physical health. In contrast, we are hurtling through intense times in April 2025.
For those of us following events, decisions and developments at the national and international levels, we are seemingly inundated daily with bleak, sobering and solemn news. In the areas of sustainability, climate change and the environment, the seriousness of the challenges we’re facing as a community, as a nation and as a global community on this planet — weakened by U.S.
Trump Administration cuts to scientific work on these and related topics — are real and compelling reasons for worry and woe. How can we pull these dueling threads of comedy and concern together as we seek to navigate a shared future with sustainability and environmental threats in a changing climate on this planet? Amid many science-led considerations, comedy and humor — as pathways to emotional, affective visceral and experiential ways of learning and recognizing — have been potent places to access what might be viewed as otherwise complex conversations. As climate science findings have the potential to overwhelm everyday people, comedy helps overcome jargon and meet people where they are.
Comedy can make more digestible chunks of climate information by translating probabilistic science into compelling stories, making communications more palatable. Comedy and humor — and by extension, laughter — also have the power to productively provide relief amid anxiety-producing realities regarding climate change and environmental issues — particularly among young people — while still addressing the many associated challenges at hand. For people of all ages, research has found that approaching sustainability, environment and climate change issues with some humor can help overcome polarization, partisanship and division.
Comedy lowers defenses and bridges otherwise difficult topics in less threatening ways. By bringing in the tools of comedy to these conversations — without trivializing otherwise critically important issues — we can recapture a missing middle ground of discussions as we engage wider audiences. In entertaining and non-threatening ways, comedy has helped to explore peculiarities, incongruities, falsehoods and hypocrisies that we face in our everyday spaces.
Through multiple comedic pathways — from the satirist mocking subjects and situations to the humorist who points out contradictions we live in to the comedian who punches up at problematic authority figures and systems — comedy and humor ask questions and exert power that is both disarming and subversive to challenge perspectives and create new ways of considering climate change. These days, there is some good news: more and more professional comedians have been working with climate researchers and entertainment practitioners to mine these fertile grounds, to discuss climate change with wider audiences to increase awareness and engagement. Here in Boulder, for the past ten years, CU Boulder Theater Professor Beth Osnes and I have researched and experimented with comedy as a way to effectively spark conversations about climate change.
Over the years we have refined our approaches through research insights and experiential learning to focus on climate solutions. And this Earth Day — at 7 p.m.
on April 22 — we’ll be holding our annual free and live climate comedy show at Boulder Theater with several of our students performing stand-up and sketch comedy along with three professional comedians. Through this work, we have found that these creative approaches have helped to alleviate the pangs of climate anxiety and eco-grief that many young people are facing now and make them more approachable and manageable. These activities also create spaces for college-age students to express a range of feelings — from fear and concern to hopes and ambitions — as they discuss climate challenges from their perspectives.
Twenty years ago, the animated comedy show South Park (created by CU Boulder alumni Trey Parker and Matt Stone) aired an episode called “Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow” parodying the doomsday action thriller film “The Day After Tomorrow.” They were forerunners of comedy in many ways, including climate change comedy. During International Humor Month — and Earth Day in particular — let’s embrace climate change comedy as a powerful vehicle for positive social, political and cultural change.
This is a biweekly sustainability and environment column authored by Max Boykoff. Boykoff is a faculty member at the University of Colorado Boulder, though these the views expressed here are based upon his scholarly expertise and research/creative experience as well as personal views and should not be considered the university’s official position on any specific issue. Email: mboykoff@gmail.
com..
