“Can climate be funny?” asks Stuart Goldsmith before answering his own question. “Can grief be funny? Can war be funny? These are all the things that comics have spoken about since there have been comics.” So, why not make the climate crisis funny? That’s the challenge of the two guests that my co-host, Solitaire Townsend, and I talked with in the latest episode of our Two Steps Forward podcast. UK-based Goldsmith is a climate comedian, keynote speaker and podcaster known for getting corporate audiences (including those at our last few GreenBiz conferences) belly laughing about the fears, foibles and hypocrisies that are part of all sustainability professionals’ lives. Joining him was Esteban Gast, a Colombian-American comedian and writer. Together, they appeared last month on Netflix Is a Joke’s “An Emergency Board Meeting Slumber Party” — “a stand-up comedy show for anyone coping with the slow collapse of everything” — along with Adam McKay, Robby Hoffman, Jimmy O. Yang and others. Goldsmith and Gast work a genuinely difficult beat. Climate isn’t exactly a natural setup-punchline subject. It’s as serious as a heart attack. And yet both men have built careers using climate as a setup in comedy clubs, at corporate events and in front of audiences who likely had little idea what was coming. A few things from the conversation stuck with me. Hypocrisy is the material. Climate comedy works precisely because climate is soaked in ambiguity, guilt and contradiction. The more unspoken the truth, the more juice there is in it.…
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