Students and Professional Comedians Co-Creating Climate Comedy

• In Event: Laugh, and the World Laughs With You? The Comedic Turn in Environmental Education Research

Abstract

Did you hear the one about the 15 comedians who walked into a Creative Climate Communication course during a global pandemic? No, of course you didn’t, because they didn’t walk in; they Zoomed in. This paper serves as an introduction to a class project to co-create climate comedy through a partnership between an undergraduate class of 45 students and 15 professional comedians from across the USA. By sharing our learning objectives, assignments, activities, and outcomes, we hope to provide a practical model for real-world collaborations in educational spaces. During the spring semester of 2021 -- while nightclubs across the world remain largely closed to live stand-up comedy -- we co-instructors of a course entitled Creative Climate Communication concocted a plan. We decided to recruit and pay 10 comedians from coast to coast to partner with our students to create climate comedy in an online environment. Through a long-term, climate comedy partnership with New York comedian, Chuck Nice, we put out the call to comedians far and wide. The response was overwhelmingly positive, such that we ended up with 15 comedians. We thus divided the class into 15 groups, matching each with a comedian. Each group chose a specific climate solution from the list generated by Project Drawdown for their assigned comedian to focus on in their comic piece. Students provided a summary of research on the solution, links to media stories about this solution, and ideas for jokes and comic approaches for this solution. The comedian used this material to create an original comic piece. Multiple visits to our online class allowed for a collaborative process including feedback, development, inquiry, and fun. Finished comic pieces were recorded before a “live” Zoom audience of the class to provide a laugh track. Select pieces were included in the annual “Inside the Greenhouse Stand Up for Climate Comedy Show” that launched online on Earth Day, April 22, 2021. Analysis of this project took two forms. We analyzed the collaborative creative process and we examined the extent to which these activities and approaches were effective in supporting students in reaching our stated learning objectives. We also examined the comedy itself that was created from this pedagogical process. Our theoretical approach for both forms of analysis is a “performance for social change framework” (Borstel & Korza, 2017) with an emphasis on “comedy for social justice” (Chattoo & Feldman, 2020; Meier & Schmitt, 2016). Based on our analysis, we share lessons learned and recommendations that emerge from this experiment of co-creating climate comedy in a college classroom. We hope this will help inspire and inform similar pedagogical experimentations on the use of comedy in the communication of climate in unconventional yet highly productive modes.

Authors

• Beth Osnes

• Max Boykoff

• Patrick Chandler

• Benjamin Stasny