Creative Strategies to Climate Comedy - a report by OKRE and Climate Spring

If you pitched a joke about an interfering mother-in-law, tiny in-flight snacks, or three Brits from different nations entering a bar, the only laughs you’d expect would be those accompanying your rapid exit from the writer’s room.

Yet when it comes to climate change, it can be hard to think past the same hack tropes – sad polar bears on drippy glaciers, people gluing themselves to bits of infrastructure, reusable cups. This can be a massive roadblock if you’re ultimately just trying to land a gag – not ruminate on our imminent extinction. As comedy producers instinctively know, comedy can be a powerful tool for messaging – but that it will always be judged primarily, maybe even solely, on whether it’s funny. Climate change may be many things – fascinating, terrifying, dramatic, complex – but funny?

At this point, we are beyond needing to simply raise awareness about climate change. Everybody’s heard about it, and the majority are deeply concerned. Audiences need to move beyond terror and fatalism towards action – which means a deeper engagement with how it's affecting us and our health, who's responsible how our lives will change, and where we want to go. Climate issues already affect every every aspect of our day-to-day lives; happily for us, the texture of daily life is where comedy thrives.

But what does good climate comedy even look like?

It helps if we stop thinking about climate change as a single issue. It’s more of a context – an umbrella term for thousands of smaller topics that encompass everything - our physical and mental health, our daily routines, the weather, politics… All of these are rich, fertile soil for comedy. Push past the cliches, and we find that not only is there a wealth of material ripe for comedy, but that mainstream, popular comedies have in fact been talking about this stuff for over five decades. We believe the most impactful content meets audiences where they are. We’ve been working to identify examples of where mainstream comedy has authentically reflected climate matters, and we’ve used these to create eight strategies for bringing climate topics into comedy. We think there are a wealth of creative possibilities beyond the obvious clichés; if you’re in the comedy game and you're grappling with how to reference climate matters, we hope you find these strategies useful – and we can’t wait to see what you do with them.

Delve into our full report here.