Professor Aaron Sachs on Why So Serious? How Environmental Humor Became an Oxymoron provided an engaging (an problematic) discussion on comedy and its effects on environmentalism. He outlined some sharp contrasts between comedy and tragedy: comedy as a sense of unsettling, fatalistic, offensive wonder, open-endedness, and mystery that serves as a coping mechanism, while tragedy is open-and-shut, effective at grabbing our attention but not keeping it. Though his opening punchline about his grandfather’s Semitic humor was a means to invite and ease the audience into a relaxed and entertained state, I had trouble following the bridge between Jewish and environmentalist humor; it was an interesting, but slightly forced parallel.