The art of Having A Bad Time
I’ve been teaching comedy writing workshops for Whitman College in the US, specifically on using stand-up techniques to make art about the climate emergency. I was really stunned by not just the originality of what people created, but by the refusal to accept a defeatist or dumbed down approach to communicating about the climate crisis. Maybe it’s because I’m in the UK, where we’re more used to being downtrodden, bootlicking serfs, grumbling but usually accepting our fate. The Americans have more oomph.
I love teaching these because what people bring to each session and create afterwards is completely unique to them. I’m not force-feeding a particular way to do comedy: the point of each workshop is to learn key writing and performing techniques, support each person as they adapt them to their own material and style, then release them into whatever catches their interest. One comic experimented with a stand-up set that intentionally bombed more and more under the harrowing dread of climate change; there was smartly-observed satire on greenwashing; one performer went into full-blown absurdism about a creature on the sea floor. It was rad.
What struck me is how sensitive the artists were to how the tone of your work defines whether you’ll keep people’s attention. A few people asked questions about where you most effectively set your level of urgency and dread. They don’t buy the “climate optimism” approach that seems practical and grounded at first, reassuring people that there are consumerist solutions and we’ll figure it all out, but means people check out of any climate involvement. Equally, they’ve seen that trying to scare people with a wall of urgency, doom and humanitarian despair doesn’t work. If people had listened to climate scientists sounding the alarm bells for the last few decades, there might be less of a climate emergency.
It’s tough and it shows that there is no one single meaning of “climate crisis” that we’re all talking about. An upshot of this is that it gives creators permission to really, really honestly ask what climate crisis actually means for your own life, so you’re connecting over things that are actually relatable. What would you say about the climate crisis that matters to your Mum, instead of vaguely gesturing towards solemn figures about global temperature rises from the U.N? I think this is where stand-up specifically has arguably the most relevant and effective communication tools: you can draw on mundane bits of your actual life, admit that you’re not even really sure what you’re doing, and be honest that you’re getting it wrong.
In practice, it’s something that I’ve been finding very difficult, and where I think I’ve met the edges of my current skillset as a comic. For me, the climate dread is connected to the realisation that I don’t have loads of time to choose whether or not to have children, which isn’t just a major existential decision about my own life – it’s potentially casting unsuspecting new people onto a dying planet and into a future that the evidence says looks Quite Bad. There’s pros and cons about bringing this up onstage. On the one hand it shows some vulnerability, and I’m being honest that I have limited time to make decisions that I just don’t know if I’ll be happy with. On the other hand, it can very easily be misread as me judging people for having children or not having children. That’s not what I mean at all, but it takes delicate padding to fully explain.
There’s also the actual process of how you develop these bits so you can realistically be e.g. on a mixed bill in Tunbridge Wells, talking about your climate dread as part of a bookable set to people who just want a night off. I don’t want people to be having a bad time at a comedy show, including me. I find myself going round in spirals of: Oh god, do I really wanna haul my ass around the UK on trains I can’t afford, doing material that might not work, about things no one wants to hear? I’m not sure what insane compulsion means I’ve stubbornly kept trying to shove these thoughts into the cash-strapped world of entertainment. Comedy’s a great medium if you like to scoop out the insides of your soul like a pumpkin, hold the mess in front of people with your bare hands, and have a producer say “Great – do you think that you could make this work on TikTok?”
Other people are doing it really well. Josie Long’s brilliant hour Tender is about the headmelt of bringing children into the world knowing everything you do about the climate crisis. Stuart Goldsmith is doing the lord’s work by getting climate material onto Live at the Apollo and onto the UK club circuit. Dr Matt Winning, Eleri Morgan and Andrew O’Neill – to name just a few – are all comics who’ve brought climate change to the front of their comedy. What made me feel hopeful and excited about these workshops was that new creators won’t accept feeble and oversimplified ways to talk about climate crisis. The effectiveness lies in how there just isn’t a single unified narrative about climate change: it’s in the wildly different creative approaches and specific, personal dread people have that there might be some change.
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