This is part 21 of a series on writing climate change for fiction.
“The mountain by its trees weakens itself. The grease which ministers to the fire fries itself. The cinnamon tree can be eaten, and therefore it is cut down. The varnish tree is useful, and therefore incisions are made in it. All men know the advantage of being useful, but no one knows the advantage of being useless.” – Zhuangzi, 4th century BC
“You have a morbid aversion to dying. You probably resent the fact that you're at war and might get your head blown off any second."
"I more than resent it, sir. I'm absolutely incensed."
"You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don't like bigots, bullies, snobs, or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate."
"Consciously, sir, consciously," Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. "I hate them consciously."
"You're antagonistic to the idea of being robbed, exploited, degraded, humiliated, or deceived. Misery depresses you. Ignorance depresses you. Persecution depresses you. Violence depresses you. Corruption depresses you. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if you're a manic-depressive!"
"Yes, sir. Perhaps I am."
"Don't try to deny it."
"I'm not denying it, sir," said Yossarian, pleased with the miraculous rapport that finally existed between them. "I agree with all you've said.”
- Catch-22
Climate Comedy
Most people who look at climate comedy do so at the level of “Can jokes make people care?” The answer is yes. If you do it well. You can do great things like:
Laugh instead of crying.
Make a dense and depressing subject appealing to a broad audience.
Brutally satirize our entire political and economic system.
But neither that question nor that answer is particularly interesting.
The techniques required are much the same as anything else. Any standard comedy writing advice can teach you how. So, rather than rehash the rule-of-three applied to cow farts, we’re going to follow Joseph Meeker’s insight that we touched on last time: comedy as the ultimate eco-genre.
It’s a bit deeper than mere jokes, and cuts down into the very causes of environmental destruction. Here we go!
Beyond Jokes – Comedy as Way of Being
We’ve seen a few models of behavior so far in this series. Literary role models. Things we might like to do for real when confronted with climate breakdown.
In the Apocalyptic we had a religious vision of repentance and prophecy. Plenty of people are doing this, going vegan and shouting at cops.
In the Weird we had unfortunates melting in the face overwhelming cosmic horror. Again, plenty of real people are succumbing to the darkness.
In Epic and Tragedy we had figures of noble self-sacrifice, doomed to destruction for their heroic cause. Again, plenty of real people are trying to be climate heroes.
In modern fiction we had the individualistic literary hero, languishing in a society that cannot understand them, escaping civilization to go live in the woods. Again, that’s a popular option for both Hippies and Preppers.
All these literary archetypes have real world power. Everywhere you will hear calls to adopt one as your mode of life: repent, give up, fight, drop out...
What you don’t hear so much is this:
Be useless.
Be lazy.
Have sex.
Lie to everyone.
Hide up a tree.
That just doesn’t sound very helpful, does it?
Where’s the suffering? Where’s the dolphin-friendly gluten-free vegan recycling? How does this overthrow the government in glorious revolution? How?
Ah!
But maybe it does.
Welcome to an alternative way out of climate chaos. The fun way.
A Brief History of Life
For over three billion years, life on Earth has been committed to one unbreakable goal: living.
We are alive.
Every year the sycamore tree in my yard produces thousands of seeds. Not once has it successfully reproduced. But goddamn does it keep trying.
Life lives.
Life keeps trying to have babies. Living, and living, and living. Life upon life. Everything – eating, breathing, breeding. Life.
That’s what we are.
Traditionally comedies end with a wedding. Greek comedy supposedly originated from fertility rites. Sex. Happy endings. Life living.
Think about that for a moment. Think about the significance of that commitment to life in a time when a lot of things are dying.
“Earth is delighted now, peace is the voice of earth.
Spartans, sort out your wives: Athenians, yours.
Let each catch hands with his wife and dance his joy,
Dance out his thanks, be grateful in music,
And promise reformation with his heels.”– Lysistrata, by Aristophanes 411 BC
(The original make-love-not-war protest, preformed during a brutal war between Athens and Sparta, and involving a very large number of sex and dick jokes.).
The Comic Hero
Joseph Meeker, in The Comedy of Survival, takes the comic hero as the archetypal ecological character.
The comic hero has the small and simple aim of:
not dying, and
hopefully getting laid.
Maybe they get there by wit, maybe by sheer dumb luck. Either way they’re desperately trying to get to the place we all want to be: happy and alive.
They are the eccentric.
The loveable rogue.
A criminal who’s morality is disconnected from law. A lunatic who’s rationality departs from common sense.
All that noble self-sacrifice goes out the window. The comic hero is willing to adapt to their absurd society, but only in a way that doesn’t destroy their ability to live. Which means they’ll probably do some fairly ridiculous things, and lie repeatedly. They’re not immoral. They are against the kinds of morality that demand that they must suffer and die.
Very few of us ever stand in the role of classic world-saving heroes. Most of us, most of the time, are living in the space of comic heroes. This is who we the people actually are. Small, unimportant, and just trying to get by.
And that can be incredibly subversive.
Everyday Real World Comedy Rogues
To anyone paying attention it’s obvious that the same systems destroying the planet are also really annoying to live with. Traffic jams, incompetent bosses, dodgy landlords, billionaires making websites unusable. Just trying to live puts us in direct conflict with the forces destroying the world. Yossarian from Catch-22 is an excellent example of this kind of confrontation.
Pitting one man’s desire for life up against the bureaucratic machinery of World War Two, opens up the possibility of re-framing the entire concept of war. Suddenly your enemy becomes anyone who’s trying to kill you. The victor of the war becomes Italy - the first to stop fighting. All things are judged on how well they allow ordinary people to survive.
Every life, in these smallest of incidents, becomes a test case for the whole. If the society I live in doesn’t allow me to live, then what the hell is going on? My most trivial of inconveniences can bust the whole thing open.
When we embrace this unraveling and busting open, we enter a new space. A wild, ridiculous, dangerous, wonderful space.
The space of creative renewal.
Tricksters and Carnivals
This stuff goes much deeper than eccentrics and loveable rogues.
Many cultures have some variation on a Trickster character, a figure who pushes all this up to cosmic proportions. Loki, Raven, Coyote, Maui, the Monkey King, Odysseus. They’re mythology’s comedians.
The Trickster crosses boundaries, physical and social. They shape-shift. They gender-shift. They break rules. They exist in rebellion against the established order. They get by with cunning and deception. They pull pranks on the gods. They create and destroy.
These figures vary enormously between traditions, but there’s a basic core there. The Trickster shows which rules in the world are arbitrary. They exist in between all the rules, in a childlike space of chaos and creative play.
The Trickster is mythology’s revolutionary.
Similar to Tricksters we also have Carnival.
Applied to literature this become the idea of Carnivalesque. Humor and chaos come to together. Social hierarchies are broken down. Norms of behavior are suspended. Everything is brought down to earth in a sort of primal unity achieved through laughter.
This is the creative space from which all things can be remade. To quote David Graeber:
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
Comedy, at this deep level, is what reminds us that everything is a made up game. The appeal for writing about climate change this way should be fairly obvious.
Climate change demands and will unleash substantial remaking. Deep comedy is the form where that creative chaos can be unleashed.
And...
Now we need to talk about Satan.
We Live in a World Ruled by an Evil Trickster God
As Western culture emerged into modernity, and out from the under the hegemony of Christian religion, the arts and literature went through a weird Goth phase. A certain section of the arts got really morbid, and really into Satan.
Indeed, that individualistic tragic literary hero that we’ve looked at previously is partially based on Satan.
So moody. So dark. Such a bad boy. A bad, sexy, boy.
Western culture has an odd relationship with the idea of chaos and creative change.
Paganism had tricksters. Christianity had Satan. Death, chaos, sex, rebellion, and change all got merged into one singular Satanic evil. In other words, we put all the fun stuff into a bucket labelled EVIL, so when modern artists went looking for life they came up dripping with death – hence all the Goth stuff.
Worrying about Satan might sound fairly arcane in this context, but this does feed directly into pop-culture.
Consider Batman.
Batman’s nemesis is a Trickster – the Joker.
The Joker is literally a comedian. He is also evil. He’s a psychopath. He’s mentally diseased. He is nihilistic chaos. He knows it’s all bullshit and he’s going to burn it all down. The angst that fuels revolutions gathers around him. And yet, stepping into the Joker’s space of creative chaos is not merely dangerous, but a sickness.
You might even call him Satanic.
The other franchise takes Loki, literally the Norse Trickster god, and does much the same with him. He’s a bad guy. Loveable maybe, but kind of messed up. Probably a diagnosable narcissist.
Belief in Satan feeds directly into politics too.
Indeed, it nearly helped overthrow the US government not so long ago. Things like QAnon are simply the latest of a very longstanding habit of looking for Satanist baby murder during stressful times. We did it for medieval Jews with the Blood Libel. We did it for 17th century witch-hunts. We did it for the 1980s Satanic Panic. We can’t seem to stop our paranoia that hidden evil forces are out to get us, probably by murdering our babies.
We really don’t know how to handle chaos.
The space that might otherwise be occupied by comedy & hi-jinks, is instead occupied by skulls and witch burnings.
To complicate matters, the status quo which we are defending from Satan, could itself be described as Satanic.
Indeed, daily life under capitalism means living in a world of bewildering mutation, shape-shifting, and lies where greed is good and the economy benefits when you succumb to your lusts. Just visit a supermarket – every product is lying to you, trying to seduce you into evil, very agents of the Apocalypse. And that’s just the experience of buying milk.
All this is a very long way of saying:
If your thinking about portraying our historical moment in morbid gothic tones, just stop for a moment.
Ask:
Would it work as a comedy?
Western culture has a serious Satan-complex. That dark creepy place in which all things melt into chaos leaves no path out from death.
Comedy can enter that same space of chaos, but instead of evil and death comedy can bring life.
Climate change is and will unleash chaos.
That chaos is terrifying. A significant number of people will respond to that chaos by searching for the secret baby killing Satanists. That could include otherwise sensible and progressive people.
Comedy can bring us back from that darkness.
Comedy can turn chaos into play. When life becomes a game, we discover that we get to change the rules. We can go there without descending into nihilism, or getting weirdly into skulls. In comedy the world is no longer ruled by Satan, but by a spirit of joy.
Goddamn it we need to laugh.
An Example
To end with, let’s compare two climate focused films about the same subject, where one is a comedy.
This is a tight paced thriller involving... guess what. The characters are somewhat angry, and moody, and it involves some amount of heroic or even tragic self-sacrifice. It’s a call to arms which risks putting you on an FBI watch list (the film’s website has a map of pipeline locations, just in case you need that info... for reasons...).
B) Woman at War
This is also about blowing up critical infrastructure. But it’s a soft and gentle comedy full of quirkiness and hi-jinks. Woman at War is safe enough to watch with your grandmother. Nobody really does any truly tragic sacrifice as such, and it involves a very clear commitment to life (in this case a child rather than a marriage).
Both are good films, and both approaches have their place.
But it’s interesting to consider what the addition of comedy does to what is otherwise the same somewhat extreme and harrowing scenario: committing sabotage to stop climate change.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is not something you can really live with over the long run. It’s a war movie. It’s a propaganda recruitment film. You watch that stuff to psyche yourself up to do something which risks getting you shot. It’s something you die with.
By adding comedy to the exact same plot, we get something rather different. You probably don’t want to use Woman at War as a recruiting tool for your terrorist militia, but in that comedic opening and softening we get something powerful in a very different way. We open a space to question. Your grandmother might ask, “Should I become a eco-sabateour?” We open a space to feel difficult emotions. A space to change the culture itself. A space of joy in difficult times.
This is what comedy can do. It can find us a way out and through, and hopefully towards life.
Finally – A Dumb Joke
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Global Warming.
That’s not funny.
No, of course not. This is a very serious subject.
Next time the series continues, getting into a little bit of literary history, as we head towards either the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end of this series.
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