Comedy and the Environment: How Humour Tackles Climate Change, Greenwashing and Eco-Guilt
The climate crisis is not funny. The way we talk about it, sell it and fail to act on it often is. A guide to the sketches, films and satire that get it right.
Climate change is not funny, but almost everything humans do around it is: the corporate pledges, the bamboo toothbrush bought next to a long-haul flight, the senator who brought a snowball onto the Senate floor, the impossible maths of being a good consumer. Environmental comedy works best when it aims there, at the gap between what we say about the planet and what we actually do. Here are the sketches, shows and films that do it well, what research says about humour and climate, and how to write it yourself.
Why environmental comedy is hard
Most comedy needs a target that can be embarrassed. Climate change has no face. It is slow, global and statistical, and the people most affected are rarely the people causing it. That makes three common approaches fall flat:
- Jokes about the weather. "It's so hot" is an observation, not a joke, and it trivialises real disasters.
- Preaching with punchlines. Audiences can smell a lecture, and people who are not already worried tune out.
- Pure doom. Very dark humour about extinction can be cathartic for the anxious but tends to leave everyone else either numb or defensive.
The environmental comedy that lands tends to aim at three easier targets: hypocrisy (ours and everyone else's), greenwashing (corporations and institutions pretending) and absurdity (the strange new normal of adapting to a changing planet).
Sketches about eco-friendly habits
The best eco-habit comedy is self-implicating. It mocks the well-meaning, slightly smug consumer rather than the climate itself, and audiences recognise themselves.
- Portlandia (IFC, 2011-2018). Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein's sketch show about Portland, Oregon is the definitive comedy of eco-conscious living. In its most famous early sketch, a couple at a restaurant question their server so intensely about the life of the chicken they might order (its name, its diet, its friends) that they leave to go and visit the farm. Other sketches skewer obsessive recycling and the moral status of reusable bags. The joke is never that caring about the environment is stupid. It is that consumer virtue can become its own kind of self-regard.
- 30 Rock, "Greenzo" (2007). NBC's fictional network launches an environmental mascot (played by David Schwimmer) for a corporate "green week", and he quickly becomes a sell-out shill for the parent company. It was a direct parody of the real network's green branding at the time, and a neat lesson in greenwashing.
- The Good Place, "The Book of Dougs" (2019). The characters discover that nobody has qualified for the good afterlife in centuries, because modern life is so complicated that buying a tomato involves unknowingly supporting pesticides, exploited labour and carbon emissions. It is the best comic explanation yet of why individual ethical consumption feels impossible.
Satire of greenwashing and corporations
Corporate environmental claims are a perfect satirical target: they are already performances, and they often contradict themselves. Comedy has invented a whole gallery of fictional companies to make the point:
| Fictional company | Where | What it satirises |
|---|---|---|
| Buy n Large | WALL-E (2008) | A megacorporation that sells everything, runs the government and buries Earth in waste. |
| Mom's Friendly Robot Company | Futurama | A folksy brand image fronting a ruthless conglomerate. |
| BASH | Don't Look Up (2021) | A tech billionaire's company that puts profit from a comet's minerals ahead of saving the planet. |
| Springfield Nuclear Power Plant | The Simpsons | Decades of jokes about pollution, safety corner-cutting and a boss who is openly evil. |
Real campaigners have borrowed the technique. In 2010 Greenpeace released a parody of a Kit Kat advert to protest Nestlé's use of palm oil linked to rainforest destruction, and Nestlé announced new sourcing commitments within a couple of months. In 2012 Greenpeace and the prank collective the Yes Men ran a fake "Arctic Ready" campaign, imitating Shell's branding so convincingly that many people believed it was real. Both show satire working as activism; more examples are on our comedy and activism page.
Climate change on screen
Don't Look Up (2021)
Adam McKay's Netflix film is the biggest climate comedy ever made, though it never mentions climate. Two astronomers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet that will destroy Earth, and nobody, from the president to morning TV hosts, takes it seriously. Critics were split on it as a film; many scientists loved it because it captured their frustration exactly. Its broad, angry style is a useful contrast to subtler work.
The Curse (2023)
Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie's series follows a couple (Fielder and Emma Stone) making a home-improvement TV show about energy-efficient "passive houses" while gentrifying a small New Mexico town. It is excruciating rather than laugh-out-loud funny, and one of the sharpest portraits of environmental virtue as personal branding. See our page on Nathan Fielder for more of his work.
Animation
Animation has always been good at environmental satire because it can show the future. WALL-E imagines a rubbish-covered Earth abandoned by humans. The Simpsons Movie (2007) hinges on Homer polluting Springfield's lake. Futurama's 2002 episode "Crimes of the Hot" satirised global warming years before it became a mainstream comedy topic. South Park mocked Al Gore's climate warnings through the ManBearPig episode in 2006, then, in a 2018 episode, had its characters admit Gore had been right all along: possibly the only time a sitcom has publicly retracted its own climate joke.
Satirical news
In 2014 John Oliver staged a "statistically representative" climate debate on Last Week Tonight: one climate sceptic against Bill Nye backed by 96 other scientists, mocking the way TV news gave both sides equal time. It became one of the most-shared climate clips of its decade. The Onion has also run decades of headlines in which the joke is simply humanity's calm refusal to change anything.
Comedians and science communicators
A smaller group of performers works at the line between comedy and science communication:
- Matt Winning, a UK climate researcher who also performs stand-up, uses jokes to explain climate policy and wrote the popular book Hot Mess on what people can actually do.
- Climate Adam (Adam Levy) makes YouTube videos mixing climate science with sketches and silly characters.
- Bill Nye came out of the Seattle sketch show Almost Live! before becoming the Science Guy, and has been a long-time climate communicator.
The common thread is that the jokes serve the explanation. They make information memorable rather than replace it, which links to the wider research on learning through comedy.
Comedy about adapting to a hotter world
A newer seam of climate humour skips the question of whether things will change and looks at how people are already adjusting. It is fertile ground because adaptation produces exactly the kind of mundane absurdity comedy thrives on: estate agents describing flood risk as a "water feature", offices installing a third fan instead of fixing the building, weddings planned around wildfire season, the slow normalisation of checking air quality before a run.
This kind of material tends to work because it is observational rather than apocalyptic. Nobody is lectured; the audience simply recognises the strange new habits they have picked up. It also sidesteps the fatalism problem: people adapting, however clumsily, are people still trying. If you are writing environmental comedy, the near future is often a better setting than the end of the world.
Does climate comedy work?
Researchers have tested this, and the results are encouraging if modest. Studies of satirical news have found that climate segments on shows like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show can increase viewers' certainty that global warming is happening. Experiments run at Cornell comparing fear-based and humour-based climate messages suggested humour was particularly effective with the youngest adults, who may be more open to comic framing and more numb to doom.
The general findings on comedy and persuasion (covered on our comedy and social change page) apply here too: humour lowers defensiveness and grabs attention, but rarely converts committed sceptics. Its most useful role may be emotional. People who feel overwhelmed by climate anxiety often find that laughing about it, especially at the absurdities of the response, makes the subject bearable enough to keep engaging with.
Dark humour and its limits
Gallows humour about climate is everywhere online: memes about summers being "the coolest of the rest of your life", jokes about buying property in places that will be underwater. It can help people cope, and it is a legitimate tradition (see our page on dark comedy). But it has two risks. It can slide into fatalism, which campaigners argue is now as big an obstacle as denial. And jokes about disasters can land very differently on people who have lived through floods, fires or displacement. The usual comedy rule applies: think about who is the butt of the joke.
Frequently asked questions
What are some comedy sketches about eco-friendly habits?
Portlandia's sketches about obsessive recycling and a couple interrogating a waiter about their chicken's upbringing are the classic examples. 30 Rock's 2007 episode 'Greenzo' mocks a TV network's corporate green week, and The Good Place's 'The Book of Dougs' shows how impossible ethical consumption has become.
Is there comedy about climate change?
Yes. Notable examples include Adam McKay's film Don't Look Up (2021), John Oliver's 2014 'statistically representative' climate debate, The Curse (2023) by Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, South Park's ManBearPig episodes, and stand-ups and science communicators who mix climate science with comedy.
Does humor help with climate change communication?
Studies suggest it can. Research on satirical news has found climate segments can raise viewers' certainty that global warming is real, and experiments comparing fear and humour appeals suggest humour may work particularly well with younger audiences. Humour tends to lower defensiveness and reduce the paralysis that pure doom can cause.
What are examples of fictional satirical environmental corporations?
Buy n Large, the megacorporation that buries Earth in rubbish in WALL-E; Mom's Friendly Robot Company in Futurama; BASH, the tech company in Don't Look Up; and Mr. Burns's nuclear plant in The Simpsons are among the best-known.