One of the most emblematic figures in the history of political comedy is that of the court jester openly speaking truth to power under the protection of a witty delivery. Comedy is presupposed to have that mystical charm. It can reveal truth in a way that a shedload of PowerPoint presentations cannot, and it disarms the target, who cannot be seen to react negatively for fear of appearing even more foolish. And when the jester holds the mirror up to the public, we can observe our own foolishness and laugh with no sense of resentment. I can’t get angry with Michael Macintyre, because I too have a man drawer, and I am just relieved to see that this appears to be one of those follies that I share with the rest of my gender. It’s funny because it’s true.

But let’s not get too dewy-eyed here, for comedy also has a long and dark history when it comes to making critical observations in a disarming manner. Whether it be as a tool of political subjugation or insurrection, humour can be a powerful force for both good and evil, and the targets are not necessarily in a position to defend themselves. In his essay, “Humour in Nazi Germany: Resistance and Propaganda? The Popular Desire for an All-Embracing Laughter”, author Patrick Merziger wryly observes:

The concept of humour as political agitation is to be found in Henri Bergson’s influential text Le Rire, where laughter is seen as a form that brings together one community in order to destroy the other.

In the hands of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the cartoons depicting Jews as rats or having improbably protruding noses were comic instruments that helped create a zeitgeist that ultimately led to the literal destruction of communities. But even in less extreme examples, the joke can be used to destroy a community’s credibility, which may be important when dealing with out-groups that seek to challenge an authorised narrative. Such jokes are not funny because they are true; they are funny because they are self-affirming for the in-group.

So what has any of this got to do with climate science? Well, science can be quite difficult to understand for the layperson, and so it is usual for only a simplified version of its findings to be offered for general consumption. The knack, however, is to simplify without becoming simplistic, because the simplistic can be highly misleading. Also, as the simplification increases, and the science is thereby diluted, it can be very hard to discern just how much of the result reflects the values of the translator rather than the essence of the science. Finally, science is not meant to be funny. There is no place in the scientific method for satire or mockery, so the simplified narrative shouldn’t come across as a ‘knock-knock’ joke. Science translated for the masses shouldn’t be an in-group’s self-affirming mockery of an out-group. But try telling that to the climate scientists.

Admittedly, when I say ‘the’ climate scientists, I commit the error of brushing them all with the same tar, since it is only four such scientists that appear to have latched onto the idea. In fact, the employment of humour as a tool to convey essential science to a joke-hungry public was actually the brainchild of a gentleman called Nick Oldridge, a climate campaigner who works in ‘ethical insurance’. Anxious to amplify his message, he joined forces with Utopia Bureau to set up Climate Science Breakthrough, with a vision “…to prototype different ways to communicate the climate science, and scale up those that work best to make a tangible and urgent difference.” His latest such urging involves the pairing up of prominent climate scientists with comedians so that the latter may translate the former’s exhortations into “very basic emotional ‘human’”. Hence, scientists Mark Maslin, Friederike Otto, Joanna Haig and Bill McGuire were paired up with Jo Brand, Nish Kumar, Jonathan Pie and Kiri Pritchard-McLean to produce a quartet of emotional climate science videos for your very basic human.

Of course, there is a profound arrogance to all of this, made explicit on the Climate Science Breakthrough’s website:

Scientists are brilliant and have absolutely delivered on diagnosing the climate crisis. But they aren’t trained to boil it down to absolute basics. Many are very good communicators. But science is inescapably complicated.

So this is all rather too complicated for the likes of you and I. But don’t worry because all we needed was for the forces of comedy to step forward, using their razor-sharp wit to penetrate the correspondingly dull-witted skulls of their complacent and cognitively challenged audience. In so doing they have launched a salvo of comic gems, expertly expressed in the patois of ‘human’, be it ever so basic and emotional. Here are some of their side-splitting and mind-expanding highlights:

Science speak: “We are destabilising our planet’s climate system, which is already leading to an increase in unpredictable weather events. Potentially everyone everywhere now faces a direct threat to their way of life.”

Translation into ‘human’: “Your house is on fire, but don’t worry, the next flash flood should sort it out.”

Science speak: “Renewables are now much cheaper than oil and gas and much less polluting. Switching over will save us trillions and improve the quality of our lives in the process.“

Translation into ‘human’: “Wait, so you’re saying that we can avoid all of this? What in the renewable wind-powered fuck is stopping us?“

Science speak: “Over the last two hundred years the global average temperature has risen by roughly 1.3 degrees centigrade, which sounds relatively modest but is already leading to an explosion of extreme weather events.“

Translation into ‘human’: “1.3 degrees may sound like fuck all but in practice half the world is flooded and the other half is a bonfire. And it’s still early days.”

Hilarious stuff. But we are not here to discuss the quality of humour, which is after all a matter of personal taste. Instead, the thing that needs saying is that statements that are already simplistic and contentious are being ‘translated’ here into grotesque caricature that does not simplify anything, it merely amplifies the propaganda. Let me illustrate by offering another example in the same vein:

Science speak: Jews are genetically inferior to Arians and through their self-serving activities are responsible for the destabilisation of the German economy.

Translation into ‘human’: Jews are deceitful vermin with big noses and it is high time we did something about them.

The comparison I am making here is, of course, purely one of principle. I merely seek to demonstrate how cartoon representations work, and I use an obviously harmful example taken from history. I leave open the question as to whether any harm is being done by Brand et al. In fact, I am quite certain they believe themselves to be serving an unadulterated good. Be that as it may, they are engaging in a propaganda exercise and so should be seen as useful idiots rather than court jesters. “How did I do?” asks the comedian at the end of each video, to which the scientist replies, “You did good my precious one. You did very good.”

In reality, the process of science’s simplification, and hence the potential for the propagandizing of a scientific inaccuracy, starts well before the comedians are allowed to join in. Such inaccurate simplification can even be seen in the executive summaries of the IPCC Assessment Reports; in which case, errors have been introduced long before Jo Brand takes the stage. Take, for example, the statement made in AR6’s summary for the politicians, opining that scientists are ninety five percent confident that more than half of the recent warming can be attributed to anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide. In fact, the technical body of the report had stated that if anthropogenic carbon dioxide was not deemed to be contributing to over half of recent warming, then the probability that the observed warming would have happened was only five percent – according to the models. The executive statement is therefore a transposed conditional (an example of the prosecutor’s fallacy if you will) that conveniently overlooks the uncertainties inherent in the models. This one is down to the scientists when they translated the science into ‘politician’. Feeding this to a comedian as if it were still accurate science would not help matters.

Similarly simplistic statements can be found in extreme weather event attributions that are based on causal analyses that emphasise necessity whilst omitting sufficiency. This penchant for a simplistic causal narrative can also be seen in the total absence of published papers that quantify non-climatic causation alongside the quantification of the climatic (reference Professor Patrick T. Brown’s disclosure). Then there is the scientific community’s obsession with the inappropriately aleatory handling of epistemic uncertainties, as in the portrayal of uncertainty in climate model ensembles by using a probability distribution. It has no statistical validity, but few of the climate scientists seem to care.

It wouldn’t be so bad that comedians are translating scientific narrative into ‘human’ had it not been that many of those narratives had already been translated into ‘wrong’. One can see the comedians are gleefully endorsing societally acceptable statements made by people they trust implicitly, but one cannot help wondering how things might have turned out if they had done more homework of their own. Unfortunately, such open-minded inquisitiveness is hardly ever found in a liberal intelligentsia that has confidently identified its cause in life. They have what they believe to be a narrative that is scientifically sound and all they need to do therefore is to make it so funny that you would have to be an idiot not to understand it.

Jo Brand put it well when she quipped in her introduction “If people like me have to get involved you know we are in deep shit“. Of course, by ‘being in deep shit’ she meant things climatic, but her statement makes more sense to me when it is interpreted as things political. The pushing of climate policy is indeed in trouble when it seeks the help of a comedienne who thought throwing battery acid in a politician’s face was an acceptable caricature of argument. But I’m afraid that’s what you get sometimes when you engage in comedic propaganda.

28 Comments

  2. The ” comedians” list is comedy gold in itself , they all seem to work for a big publicly funded organisation and are as funny as a hole in a parachute , all of them , so of course its altruism behind it all , just Stewart Lee seems to be a bit too busy or out of material

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  3. I’ve watched only one of the videos so far. It’s awful. After a while the very emeritus scientist (McGuire) stops pretending to be a scientist and just issues political statements and the sweary comedian (Pritchard-McLean) stops pretending to be a comedian and just swearily agrees with the scientist’s political statements.

    As John said, the project’s concept is doubly misinformational. So what is a video that abandons the concept? Unfunny sweary trebly misinformational twaddle?

    Liked by 2 people

  5. I have heard of the first three comedians, and don’t find any of them to be remotely funny. I hadn’t heard of the fourth (Kiri Pritchard-McLean), I’m afraid, but that’s just my ignorance. Having googled her, I’m not much wiser.

    Thanks for watching the videos so that I don’t have to.

    Like

  8. Marxist doomsday cult peddling propaganda and pseudoscientific dogma worries that it still has not communicated the settled science to enough simpletons, so opts to tickle their ribs as an alternative means of communicating the urgency of climate breakdown to an increasingly sceptical and pseudoscientifically challenged public.

    Like

  12. In Brand/Maslin bit, Maslin says – “solar & wind power are now over 10x cheaper that oil & gas”

    gave me a chuckle & made me wonder which one was better at comedy.

    watched the Otto one & gave up after that. Nish Kumar is such an unfunny “c**t” (using his word).

    marcus brigstocke should be in the mix, sooo funny, maybe, for some.

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  13. Claiming that renewables are 10 x cheaper than fossil fuels really is comedy.

    I wonder where the 10 x claim came from? Even CarbonBrief stopped at 9 x

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  14. As can be seen from some of the comments on this thread, there is plenty of comedy to be found in the writings of the supposed climate scientists taking part here. Take Bill McGuire, for example. Despite the way he likes to portray himself, he isn’t even a climate scientist; he’s a volcanologist who discovered, like so many others in disparate fields, that finding a climate change connection for his research works wonderfully when it comes to receiving grants and gaining publication. In his instance, the contrived connection was an increase in volcanic and earthquake activity resulting from rising atmospheric temperatures. It’s an inventive idea, but the obviousness of his bandwagon jumping is still quite funny — Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards, indeed.

    As for the actual comedians on show, I agree with Vinny and Stoneman in saying that they are about as funny as smallpox but not as welcome. This is particularly true of Nish Kumar, who I find insufferably arrogant and self-opinionated, whilst lacking any comedic craft to compensate. But as I say, comedy is a matter of personal taste. Here is a comic that I find more to mine. Note, however, that the follow-on panel debate nicely illustrates that comedians of all levels of inability are engaged on both sides of the propaganda war:

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  16. Lord Ridgway, this essay you’ve written makes a strong case for my winning this year’s Skeksi for Best Judg of Talent in Writing or Essays. Along with my other recruit Mr Hodgson, you’ve brought an acute edg to a blog that was, if not lacking in cuttingness, then certainly superfluous in post-gammatical vowels, thus vindicating my judgment in spades. Or at least blades.

    What, indeed, can be the honest purpose of using comics to amplify a message that’s already insultingly amplistic?

    And don’t get the likes of you and me [sic] started on Arians [sic], who, if anything, the Catholic church historically diagnoses as even sicker than Jewish persons.

    So, speaking of heresies, I owe it to you to test yours. If, as you propose, funniness isn’t bound to either moral or factual truth in some necessary way, then why are there no decent climate-alarmist comedians? Why are all the funny Jew jokes written by Jews, not Nazis?

    (And please don’t say humor is subjective. I mean, sure, if it were *close*, I might want to give the other side the benefit of the doubt. But in this case we can safely stipulate the de gustibus non disputandum rule: when it comes to taste, there simply is no debate.)

    Signed,

    Brad

    Climate Edglord, Second Dan

    Liked by 1 person

  18. Brad,

    A good comedian can make an audience laugh despite themselves. Jimmy Carr, for example, goes out of his way to make his audience laugh at stuff that is neither true nor wholesome, and he tells them that’s what he is going to do at the start of his routine. A bad comedian could still make people laugh with poor taste humour, but only if he or she is telling the audience what they wanted to hear, i.e. they are bought into the “it’s funny ‘cos it’s true” idea simply because it is an idea that is affirming to them. So you are absolutely right that there is an objective metric by which one can judge the quality of humour, but that metric is a poor predictor of success.

    Take Nish Kumar, for example. By any objective metric, his ‘jokes’ are terrible, and yet he is enormously successful. He is touring this year and, according to his promo, you can “expect jokes about climate collapse, income inequality and the emotional sensation of being a British Indian man who isn’t going to vote for a British Indian Prime Minister.” So I expect it will be a typically left-wing liberal routine, delivered to a likeminded audience. I also expect he will include his hilarious “what in the renewable wind-powered fuck is stopping us?” gag. He may also open with his hilarious observation, also delivered in his Climate Breakthrough video, that he can offend old white males simply by opening his mouth, suggesting that this is a demographic that is so bigoted that, as a black man, he doesn’t even have to say anything to cause them offence. None of this comes close to being witty or true, but I guess his audience will lap it up.

    Of equal importance is that one should know the difference between ‘simple’ and ‘simplistic’ and between ‘simplify’ and ‘amplify’. I’m pleased that you appreciated someone pointing this out and thank you for your kind words.

    Liked by 2 people

  19. Mark Maslin is obviously very proud of his involvement in the Climate Science Breakthrough videos because he has written an article about it in The Conversation, proclaiming “a project that translates complex climate science into accessible and funny content to spur millions of people into action”:

    https://theconversation.com/jo-brand-translated-my-science-im-certain-that-comedy-can-connect-people-to-climate-change-223745

    There isn’t much to be gained by reading it for yourself but if you do you will be rewarded with a classic example of what I mean by simplistic and contentious remarks being passed off as accurate science. Early on he says:

    “Even though climate change is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced, research by the Climate Science Breakthrough team shows that just 2% of the public can name a climate scientist.”

    A hyperlink is provided for ‘greatest threat’, so one might be forgiven for thinking it would link to a document which includes that claim. Instead, it links to the AR6 Synthesis Report, which nowhere makes such a claim. What Maslin has done, therefore, is take all of the statements in AR6 regarding potential and actual impacts and summed them up in his own pithy way: ‘the greatest threat humanity has ever faced’. Thus speaks someone who didn’t live through the Cuban Missile Crisis and someone who doesn’t think that talk of an imminent breakout of WWIII is worthy of mention. But who are we to question the word of a sulky scientist who obviously craves the attention of the remaining 98%?

    Liked by 3 people

  21. John R, quoting Mark Maslin: ‘…research by the Climate Science Breakthrough team shows that just 2% of the public can name a climate scientist.’

    What percentage can recognise a climate scientist’s name when it’s right in front of them?

    Back in 2019, Maslin tweeted a link to an article he’d written for The Conversation. That article started with this sentence:

    The science of climate change is more than 150 years old and it is probably the most tested area of modern science.

    William ‘Stoat’ Connolley tweeted this reply*:

    Most-tested-of-modern-sci is surely bullshit.

    Maslin:

    How about you go online and read the IPCC reports and the huge amount of evidence – you may be surprised how much science we have done

    Connolley:

    Yeah I know I did some of it. But compared to say QM? Not even close.

    (I think Connolley was referring to Quantum Mechanics, which I always thought was a realm ruled by fantasists and cranks, but I only got a B in Physics A Level.)

    ===
    *https://theconversation.com/five-climate-change-science-misconceptions-debunked-122570

    **That tweet has gone, as has at least one reply by Maslin. Here’s a Wayback of the thread:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20230602083453/https://twitter.com/wmconnolley/status/1173526741928857602

    Some of the links work. Barry Woods got involved. Eg:

    you may be surprised when you realise who William is…

    Absolute LOL…

    Maslin:

    I wait to be surprised 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  22. John – thanks for the link, as usual I like to read the comments.

    this last one caught my attention –

    “David Dundas logged in via Google
    The solution to tackling climate change will be based on giving the general public a basic education in what needs to be done to convert all our energy sources to fossil carbon free energy. Once that is understood by the majority of our population, they can put pressure on our elected representatives at election time to wok to implement the necessary changes. Educating the public in the basics of what needs to be done is a tough task. I do it in my small way by giving lectures, usually online webinars, mainly to older people who have the time to listen. Having worked in three sectors of the energy as a scientist and engineer, I believe it is my moral duty to help save the planet for my grandchildren.”

    He makes NZ sound a walk in the park for Joe Public & seems have missed “put pressure on our elected representatives” happened years ago. never mind he is a “Energy Consultant”.

    Like

  23. John,

    thanks for an unstinting response.

    I would have defended your/my thesis a bit differently if you/I were I/she/them. Rather than resort to the premise that the likes of Nish Kumar are good at their craft—a possibility that, although it wouldn’t violate any laws of physics, I beg leave highly to doubt until and unless I get audio evidence of people actually laughing at his climate material—I’d push forward a different axiom. Humor, like humour, is inherently impious, and so cannot be used in the service of a state religion. Derision, sneering and hooting are the closest they can come. These have their own art, to be sure, but it isn’t wit.

    These simpletons, like Spinal Tap, have turned their simplifiers up to 11. (I believe kids these days would amply call them simps.)

    Liked by 1 person

  25. “Climate Change is Bigger Existential Threat Than Nuclear Holocaust, Says Biden”

    That isn’t truth dancing.

    It’s the reverse of truth laughing at its power to deceive yet still retain power.

    Except it might not.

    Like

  26. Mark,

    It has taken me a while to get around to reading the Daily Sceptic article you linked to yesterday but I am now in a position to respond.

    I think the first thing to say is that there are actually two questions to be asked:

    1) Does climate change represent an existential risk?

    2) If so, how does it compare in scale to that of a nuclear war?

    I think the answer to the first question is ‘no’, rendering the second question redundant. The only way the chosen expert, S. J. Beard, could keep the debate alive was by redefining ‘existential’ to mean something short of extinction, and to completely duck the question of probabilities. Hardly impressive. But then again, this is not the first time that I have been left unimpressed by a member of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk:

    And Then There Are Physicists

    Like

  27. Brad,

    If the volume of laughter is to be the measure of comedic talent, what are we to make of the lack of talent required to accidentally slip on a banana skin? As I say, talent is not a good predictor of success if raising a laugh is to be its measure. I guess the point is that a comedian’s talent will play a part, but the audience gets to dictate the rewards. In that sense alone, I would argue for the subjectivity of comedy. In all other respects I agree with you.

    Like

  28. “Film studio from Oscar-winning director aims to stir up ‘populist anger’ over climate crisis

    Yellow Dot Studios produces short-form videos to inform with ‘genuine, righteous anger’ and ‘laugh-out-loud comedy’”

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/09/adam-mckay-climate-change-commercial-videos

    “…The parody, which highlights the role fossil fuel-powered cars play in global warming, employs a darkly humorous tone, verging on preachy but with a slight wink.

    “The car commercial, it makes you a little bit angry, it makes you a little bit scared,” Staci Roberts-Steele, managing director of Yellow Dot Studios, said. “All of those types of emotions, I think, are really what fuel people to take the next step … on climate.”

    The style is characteristic of Yellow Dot’s videos, which are distributed via YouTube and social media. Other recent projects include a collaboration with I Think You Should Leave comedian Tim Robinson, and a weekly short-form series that parodies an oil company in the style of The Office.

    Another January video parodies the television show Game of Thrones, featuring actors from the program and Rainn Wilson from The Office. Wilson plays a climate scientist brought in from the future to warn the court of Westeros – a kingdom in the show – about the dangers of “big oil”….”

    And much more in a similar vein.

    Like

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