In 2021, twelve broadcasters and streamers – representing 70% of the time UK audiences spend watching TV and film – signed on to Bafta albert’s Climate Content Pledge, committing them “to using their content* to help audiences understand what tackling climate change might mean for them, as well as inspire and inform sustainable choices”. The asterisk is theirs, and leads to an amusingly broad footnote that hammers home the scope of BAFTA albert’s ambition – “For the purposes of this pledge, “content” is all programming with the exception of news.” (One assumes that the news might also contain some climate coverage from time to time.)
But all genres are not created equal. And while it’s relatively intuitive to imagine how drama and documentary might foreground climate concerns, comedy remains a particularly tough nut to crack. Climate change may be many things – fascinating, terrifying, dramatic, complex – but for many people it seems resolutely unfunny.
Part of the reason for this lies in comedy’s unique relationship with its audience. No other genre demands a single, involuntary emotional response – laughter – from the viewer. Audience reaction falls on a binary: funny / not funny; good / bad. There’s no room for a six-out-of-ten or B-minus as there is with drama or documentary. As a thought experiment, think of your favourite comedian; I can guarantee you’ll find someone online who views them with almost unhinged loathing in under five seconds.
All this makes messaging in comedy tricky. You could prime a comedy show with urgent invective, persuasive research and powerful calls to action – but if the jokes aren’t landing, all your good intentions are dead on arrival. In its purest form, comedy repels seriousness, even as the all-consuming urgency of the climate crisis demands it. If the audience isn’t laughing, they’re likely to be reaching for the remote; and they feel they’re being lectured at instead, they’ll be switching off completely.
And yet. In recent years, much attention has been given to comedy’s potential to change minds and influence perceptions, particularly within academic circles. One imagines that these academics have never had to land a punchline on a deadline, but it feels instinctively true. So how can the genre with the power to reach the parts that others don’t help with the most urgent crisis of our times?
This is precisely the challenge that Laughing Matters – the programme I am running at OKRE, the entertainment impact charity – intends to tackle head on. Over the next year we will be unveiling a series of initiatives to offer practical, creatively-attuned support to comedy writers, producers and performers who want to address climate issues in their work. Our approach takes it as a given that the jokes have to come first and that everything else is secondary. We believe that treating climate change as a single, totemic, apocalyptic issue only leads to creative paralysis – but by breaking it down into the myriad of tangible ways we already encounter it on a daily basis and the changes – both sweeping and minute – that it is already bringing to our lives, we expose rich, fertile soil for creative storytelling and – yes – laughs.
How do we do this? In part, by letting the experts break the issue down for us, so we can concentrate on finding the funny bits. Part of OKRE’s industry-leading model involves connecting writers and creatives with some of the world’s most credentialled academics and researchers who can bring a wealth of data, facts and eye-popping anecdotes into the writers’ room for everyone to ransack. At a pilot event with the BBC Comedy Collective last year, everyone was astonished at the comedy gold our academics were sitting on; this kind of inspiring collaboration frees everyone to focus on their areas of expertise – whether that’s staring down a microscope or writing gags. (A passing remark about a Narcos-style black market in olive oil in a heatwave-afflicted community felt like a fully-formed sitcom pitch in itself.)
The inaugural Laughing Matters event took place at the BBC Comedy Festival last month in the form of a roundtable attended by commissioners, writers and development creatives from some of the industry’s leading indies. Everyone spoke of the desire to reflect climate issues in their work, but all were frank about the risk of alienating audiences and candid about where the information and knowledge gaps occurred. Our approach aims to de-risk the topic and break it down into smaller, funnier pieces.
And in fact, we’ve discovered that comedy is already very good at discussing climate issues – but usually when it’s pretending to do something else. Later this month, in collaboration with Climate Spring, we’ll be publishing our analysis of how climate themes have appeared across 50 years of comedy, in a toolkit of creative strategies that comedy creatives can follow for some quick inspiration.
This is just the start; we have plenty more events, resources and tools we’ll be unveiling in the coming months. But in the meantime, whether you’re hunting for story ideas for the fifth season of your sitcom, or just grappling with the sense that you should be talking about this stuff but don’t know how – we’d love to talk to you and see how we can help. There’s always a funny side.