How to fight climate change: laugh at it
BY JOE ROWAN, August 19 2024
As a busy comedian, Stuart Goldsmith struggled to process his own “climate dread”. So he started writing jokes about it. “In comedy we say that the problems are the material. You have a problem in your life, a problem in society, a political or environmental problem, and you pore over it, and crack into it, and that’s where you find the funny stuff. And as a climate comedian, what a relief, because there are so many problems, and so I have an infinite amount of material to work with,” Goldsmith said at the sustainability conference GreenBiz 24 last February. He brought this upbeat approach to his set at THE HEAT, VOYAGERS’s first climate-tech festival on September 20 2024.
But is climate a laughing matter? “I can’t help but try and fix problems in my writing, and the climate is a pretty massive problem,” he says. “And I became more and more aware of it in the way that everyone does, sort of passing through what I think of as the membrane of climate awareness. You start thinking, ‘oh god, I’m reading a lot about this in the news. I guess it’s hopeless’.” This led him to start wondering what he could do to help. “I realised that the options seemed to be either smash the system and blockade an oil refinery or blow up a pipeline-type activism, or get an MSc in climate and start working. I thought, I’m not the sort of person that can do either of those things. So I couldn’t help but write a show about it, because I was just scared all the time”.
Goldsmith is a long-term Edinburgh Festival Fringe performer, and his climate-crisis comedy show Spoilers won best show last year. “The Edinburgh Fringe unpeeled my head as a teenager. It’s like an inspiration festival. It’s a ‘people trying things’ festival, and it’s a ‘get inspired by this’ festival. I’ve been going for 30 years, and I love it to bits.”
He’s also spent the past 12 years interviewing other comedians for his podcast, The Comedian’s Comedian, which has had over 25 million downloads. The 450+ guests include Jimmy Carr, James Acaster and Russell Howard. “A key thing it did for me was that it accidentally exposed and started to hone and refine my desire to help. My podcast is unique in comedy podcasts because being funny isn’t the point. Listening to someone and challenging them in a way that will hopefully help them is the point.”
Goldsmith attended circus school as a teenager and was a street performer for 10 years, juggling and presenting tightrope shows in Covent Garden in London. “It then turned into stand-up comedy. I just did fewer and fewer circus skills, until most of it was just talking and improvising. I just thought, I’ve got to try a gig once, so I did at a pub in Soho in 2004. I looked down and saw my hand shaking with the adrenaline on stage mid-gig, and then I was absolutely hooked. And I thought, finally, I’ve found my thing.”
When Goldsmith started performing comedy about climate change, he wondered whether this was a natural combination. “Comedy is a pressure-release valve, and that was a big challenge for me because I thought, maybe it’s wrong to do comedy about the climate because we need that pressure to make us angry, so that we take action. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that a lot of that pressure isn’t being used for action, it’s being used for fear.” He concluded that humour can prompt action too. “Humour makes us realise that we’re all the same, and an obstacle to taking any action on the climate is the feeling that ‘I’m in this alone, I’m scared, and I’m not talking about this to people in the pub, to my friends’.”
In Goldsmith’s view, change has to come from the top down. “We were never going to spontaneously decide to stop smoking in pubs, just as the 500,000 people currently in the sky aren’t going to spontaneously decide that it would be better if we didn’t fly. We need a carbon tax and decisions from on-high, and that’s the most frightening thing about it. Because if you look at how polarised countries can be, I wonder whether we will make it in time.” He believes that everyone’s individual contribution matters. “Someone told me that as little as five or six letters can change an MP’s mind, if they’re proper and non-AI generated, because they start to go, ‘Oh, a lot of people think this’.”
Beyond this, he thinks we need to be kinder to ourselves. “Recognise that swinging wildly between hope and despair is completely normal and reasonable,” he says. “Enjoy your individual climate actions, because you’re voting and you’re letting people around you see that you do it, and we’re herd animals.”
Learn more about Stuart’s work at StuartGoldsmith.com.
