Can climate change be funny? Comedian Stuart Goldsmith breaks down his stance

"I think that happens to a lot of comics. When you have a genuine thing to wrestle with, the material pours out of you, because the problems are the material."

Enter eco-dread. A term, not to be confused with eco-anxiety, used to describe quite a deep fear about the future of the planet due to ongoing climate change and crises, and it's something Goldsmith suffered with before he turned to climate comedy.

"I found I couldn't really write about anything else," he continued. "In 2022, I took in a work-in-progress show to Edinburgh Festival with a little piece of paper, which was a list of all of the things I think to myself when I'm feeling really worried about the climate.

"I remember saying to one of my agent's assistants at the time, 'I think I'm going to do a whole show about the climate crisis.'"

It was Goldsmith's own personal fears about climate change that pushed him to educate people further, offering a new way to engage with audiences who often hear about climate change in quite a depressing fashion.

"It's much easier not to think about. So to actually take something and strike it up, meet people where they are, explain such bits of it as you need to explain, and then be funny about it is a tremendous challenge," Goldsmith explained, "but it's one I really kind of got the bit between my teeth [with] now, and I don't really see the point in talking about anything else".

And for Goldsmith, it's important to be able to find that balance of ensuring people are having a good time and enjoying his jokes, while also leaving them with a further education of the climate crisis. Not everyone enjoys being preached at about a subject they know all too well, which is important for Goldsmith when writing his comedy.

He told RadioTimes.com: "There is value in preaching to the converted [but] the plan isn't to thin my audiences out until it's just nice people who care about the climate and have already opted in - that's not the plan at all.

"What I want to do is be silly. I'm a silly comedian, I like being silly. I like whimsical, daft ideas and those things are my funniest self. So to try and find the silliness in something that's to do with climate [is my aim]."

Some of Goldsmith's material is about veganism, but not as black-and-white as 'he's vegan and so the audience should be too'.

He explained: "My material is based on, you should be vegan. I mean, I'm not, God no, but you should be and that enables me to talk about climate issues to do with veganism, such as the fact that if you can get someone to switch just from beef to pork, you can reduce their food emissions by 20 per cent, and that is not an insignificant number."

Rather than giving audiences a lecture on how they should live their lives differently, Goldsmith shows them how he is attempting to do things differently "and often failing catastrophically".

"So my latest big thing is to try to tell stories of action, to kind of just talk in a funny way about things that I'm doing," Goldsmith added.

But is laughter the key to solving the climate crisis? Probably not, but it can certainly help continue the conversation around it.

"It's definitely a coping mechanism for the person saying it and for the people hearing it. But maybe coping can inspire change," Goldsmith explained.

"I think laughter and discourse. Discourse inspires change. People thinking and talking about things inspires change. I remember the conversations I have with my friends that make me laugh the most out of all the conversations I remember, they're the best bits of my life. So I think when you're laughing, you're much more receptive to ideas.

"So I think surely that proves that the way that we talk about things can be boosted, can be smooth, can be lubricated, can be tickled with laughter such that it has a real part to play."

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