Sustainable Comedy: An Eco-Effective Rhetorical Design

• In Event: Communication Activism Scholarship: Examples from Emerging Scholars

Abstract

Environmentalists often appeal to the past or to a diminished present, to guilt and sacrifice, asking people to give up what they already have so that others might get a piece of it. The irony is that although environmentalists argue for a sustainable future, much of their rhetoric purports the opposite. For the past 3 years, we have been performing as a satirical environmentalist duo, “The Composters.” Drawing on our performance work and a pastiche of theoretical and theatrical styles, via Bertolt Brecht, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jean Baudrillard, we question how environmentalism gets “performed.” In this paper, we deconstruct environmental ironies and present the possibility of a rhetorical style that reflects sustainability rather than deflecting it. We argue that dialogic performance builds an eco-effective rhetoric.

Authors

• Alison Fisher, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

• Janet Donoghue, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale