The Realm of Environmental Humor

Professor Sachs presented an interesting talk on humor involving environmentalism and how the humor takes on different environmentalists in wide range of issues. The main issue that comedians make satires for is environmentalists’ opinions on climate change. While climate change is a very serious matter to ponder about and enforce us to change our ways, Professor Sachs wonder why environmentalists are the unique group of people that do not like making fun of themselves. Many different types of people do humor in order to support their cause but environmentalists shy away from that. The society seems that they are pushing a lot of unreasonable changes while society is trying to battle different social issues. A humor piece that stuck out for me was the prius ad that had eco-friendly car with spikes. The humor criticizes how environmentalists are expecting drastic changes from the community to better the environment and sometimes these changes are not even considering how human life might change. These types of humor resonate with us as the audience because the comedians are brave enough to voice the message through such a humor display. It is hard for people to make fun of themselves but it can show the community a strong message of advocacy for their cause. Thus, Professor Sachs presents the opinion and trend that environmentalists should accept the challenge in making fun of themselves to better resonate their messages to the bigger group and become accepted by them. It is indeed risky to do comedic approaches to present the environmental issues but currently people are not taking environmentalists seriously to begin with. So, there is nothing wrong for them to try this approach to reach a middle ground with their knowledge about the environment and what people think about the same issues as well. Professor Sachs thus advocates that environmentalists should take a chance and explore the realm of comedy as a way to express the serious issues coming down on Earth.

Leave a Reply