If you had told me six months ago that I would soon be performing standup comedy to dozens of strangers, I would have assumed it was a bad dream. Public speaking ranks about as high as driving in rush hour traffic through downtown Boston on my list of favorite activities. Yet in late April, I was spooling out jokes about AI, the manosphere, gnomes, immigration and my three-year-old nephew.
A desperate antidote to dread
I hadn’t signed up for a comedy class because I’d always dreamed of doing standup; I was there because the daily dread of political and planetary free fall had become untenable. In 2019, a convergence of grim climate predictions had catapulted me into despair. I climbed out about six months later after finding a community that shared my grief and helped me move through it. But relief isn’t permanent. To my detriment, I have a habit of jumping into the deep end. Last year, I spent months interviewing the scientists who set the Doomsday Clock. Adding nuclear winter and bioweapons to my panic list didn’t help. So when I found a listing for the most unlikely of antidotes, I had to try it: climate comedy.
Over a decade ago, Belina Raffy, an improv consultant and comedy coach, grew concerned that dire warnings about climate change were making people shut down in fear and guilt. She developed a course called Sustainable Stand Up to help people working on social and environmental issues find humorous ways to share serious messages. Since then, she has taught the course internationally to everyone from Nasa climate scientists to human rights lawyers, Extinction Rebellion activists, humanitarian workers and more. This iteration was for members of the Climate Psychology Alliance, therapists who help people navigate the psychological toll of living through the climate crisis.
Learning to find lightness
The seven-week online course would culminate in a live online show. The class was limited to six participants due to its intensity. Karen Taylor, a trauma therapist based in Hartford, Connecticut, was drawn to the invitation to combine play, art and creativity with her commitment to climate psychology. Jessica Bleuer, a professor of drama therapy in Montreal, hoped comedy would help her communicate with people across political differences. Jeremy Lehrer, a therapist based in Brooklyn, was intrigued by the opportunity to try to express his values in a comedic form. I was the only non-therapist.
For the first class, we Zoomed in from our homes. I was anxious and edgy, slogging through a Boston winter that refused to end. Our first exercise wasn’t comedy, but a rant. Raffy asked each of us to pick something that made us grumpy – not the red hot thing, more like a six out of 10. We needed to ease in before tackling the big stuff. After each rant, Raffy asked us to describe “the beautiful thing” the ranter cared about. The group told me I cared about labor justice, human connection, communication and flexibility. It made me feel like a “very good person”. Still, when Raffy told us to write three jokes for homework, I wondered: did I even know what a joke was?
The philosophy of loving comedy
Raffy teaches what she calls “loving comedy”, an approach informed by the psychology of humor. Not all humor is good for us. Humor that is used to amuse and affirm others, build social bonds, and regulate emotions by finding amusement in difficult circumstances is psychologically beneficial. But humor that is used to mock others, overly disparage the self, or avoid facing difficult feelings, is detrimental. Our aim, Raffy told us, was to come from a place of, “I love myself. I love the audience. ‘The system’ is silly. And share what would be awesome.”
That’s all becoming more difficult lately, she admits. In the polycrisis, people are so activated that they want to jump straight into the fire. She’s been trying to offer more structure and bite-size exercises to help participants access their “unique wisdom”. That first week, she planted seeds for our first jokes by having us brainstorm what made us especially wise or quirky as children. I remembered how I used to make “fairy feasts” as a child, filling acorn caps with flower petals. How every day of fourth grade, I wore a long fleece stocking cap, decorated with lizards and frogs. How I sobbed when I learned that the live lobsters I had been playing with on the kitchen floor were bound for our dinner plates. I couldn’t see how any of it would become a joke, but I felt a little affection for that insistently weird and empathetic kid.
Struggling with anger and finding a way
One lesson on joke structure especially stuck with me. First, Raffy explained, you create a “circle of expectation”. Then, in the punchline, you leap outside that circle while still playing by its rules. “What happens,” she asked, “when we map one domain or pattern on to a different one?” I immediately thought about AI. I wanted to rant about all of AI’s sins, but Raffy’s advice was to pick a six instead of a 10, so I focused on one fear: that the skill of writing will become like knitting – a beloved craft, but an optional hobby – rendering my job as a professor of writing obsolete. I imagined a world in which knitting becomes a graduation requirement, transforming into an alpha male status symbol, with manosphere bros livestreaming knitting sessions, eventually “fibermaxxing” by raising their own sheep. I built to the requisite penis joke. “Spin that fiber long and thick,” I said. “Hot.” Then after a pause: “I’m gay, but even I can’t resist the insulating power of a wool sweater.” It felt good to transform a helpless thought into something silly and playful.
My own too-big anger flared up during a one-on-one coaching session a couple of weeks before our final show. I had built my set by using my teaching, knitting and three-year-old nephew Jack’s love of gnomes to comment on AI, toxic masculinity, environmental concerns and immigration justice (all are welcome, except for “Kristi’s Gnomes”). But I was struggling to find an ending. Raffy suggested I invite the gnomes and my nephew and the manosphere bros to engage in some beautiful possibility together. Some flaming righteous rage shot through me and I cried right there on Zoom. I didn’t want those hateful, dangerous men anywhere near Jack. I want to protect a world in which he can be playful and kind and curious and brave. I had reached a limit of my playfulness.
The final show and unexpected power
When I finally had an idea, I hurried to dismiss it. Absolutely too vulnerable. Surely, I will not let them see the silliest, witchiest most cringy and earnest version of me. But I scrambled for other ideas. I have had many dreams of being thrust inexplicably into a situation for which I am completely inadequate. Some days, it feels like we’re sharing the worst version of that collective bad dream. No one prepared us to face all of this – the climate crisis and fascism and the AI assault of all we hold dear, all at once. But here I was, feeling a little faint, searching a grid of unfamiliar faces for the few guests I had invited. And then I did the thing I had not wanted to. I asked a bunch of internet strangers to join me in a big, goofy “spell” of protection, one I had originally made up for my three-year-old nephew on the solstice. “Stop it!” we yelled together, to Kristi’s Gnomes and all the others who are spreading fear and hatred, thrusting our palms forward in the gesture of “halt!” I felt ridiculous and powerful all at once. Jack was there on the screen, in a sun-drenched living room with his mom and dad. He shoved his hand out, too, grinning and yelling.
What comedy taught me
Doing amateur standup is a silly, tiny thing. It won’t save the planet and it doesn’t replace any of the vital work of resistance and legislation and new world-building. I’m still angry and scared as hell. But standup helped me reconnect to my young, silly, tender heart, and showed me capacities I didn’t know I had. Stretching to find funny, authentic ways to talk about the things that keep us up at night, the therapists and I had found a way back to ourselves. “These times are meant to make us feel confused and there’s so many competing needs,” said Bleuer, who dubbed herself the niche superhero “the tear fairy” in her set. “Maybe re-tapping into what we know about ourselves prepares us for resistance better.” The comedic process had helped to reaffirm the political importance of her work as a therapist. Maybe we leap outside the circle of our own expectations and find we were already there. And so I geared up part-two of the spell: “To all other gnomes, to the immigrants and queer people and trans people, to anyone who wants to care for this earth and each other and knit together, we say ‘welcome.’” And we flapped our hands rapidly at our shoulders, ululating our hearts out.
