At the Rose Café this evening, Professor Aaron Sachs brought up an interesting tactic for getting people to listen to what you say – laugh at yourself.  Environmentalists are usually the serious type, using tragedy as a mechanism to convince people to take action against climate change.  However, according to Prof. Sachs, tragedy can often just lead to despair and no action.  Comedy, on the other hand, could potentially help garner support for environmental movements without leaving people too depressed about the future of the planet.

Lots of environmental comedy already exists, but for the most part, it is making fun of environmentalists, not the people ignoring climate change, like coal companies.  We watched an clip from a Modern Family episode, a fake Prius add, an a clip from a West Wing episode, all of which portrayed environmentalists as a group that doesn’t care about people and will do whatever it takes to save the planet, even if that means killing off all the people.  Prof. Sachs suggests flipping this around and using comedy as a way to engage people in supporting environmental causes.

I thought it was a very interesting approach to bring comedy to environmental efforts. The most surprising thing that Prof. Sachs said was that if environmentalists started laughing at themselves more, they could get more people on their side.  This seems very counterintuitive.  Wouldn’t laughing at yourself bring more attention to your faults?  But Prof. Sachs says that laughing at yourself can be a powerful tool and perhaps it could help get rid of the negative image of environmentalists as serious people who value environmental issues above all else and are unwilling to negotiate.  It seems quite challenging to come up with jokes about the environment but if done well, this strategy could reach a large audience.