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What climate comedians can teach us about storytelling

“Can climate be funny?” asks Stuart Goldsmith before answering his own question. “Can grief be funny? Can war be funny? These are all the things that comics have spoken about since there have been comics.”

So, why not make the climate crisis funny?

That’s the challenge of the two guests that my co-host, Solitaire Townsend, and I talked with in the latest episode of our Two Steps Forward podcast. UK-based Goldsmith is a climate comedian, keynote speaker and podcaster known for getting corporate audiences (including those at our last few GreenBiz conferences) belly laughing about the fears, foibles and hypocrisies that are part of all sustainability professionals’ lives.

Joining him was Esteban Gast, a Colombian-American comedian and writer. Together, they appeared last month on Netflix Is a Joke’s “An Emergency Board Meeting Slumber Party” — “a stand-up comedy show for anyone coping with the slow collapse of everything” — along with Adam McKay, Robby Hoffman, Jimmy O. Yang and others.

Goldsmith and Gast work a genuinely difficult beat. Climate isn’t exactly a natural setup-punchline subject. It’s as serious as a heart attack. And yet both men have built careers using climate as a setup in comedy clubs, at corporate events and in front of audiences who likely had little idea what was coming.

A few things from the conversation stuck with me.

Hypocrisy is the material. Climate comedy works precisely because climate is soaked in ambiguity, guilt and contradiction. The more unspoken the truth, the more juice there is in it. Both comedians talk extensively about their own failures — Goldsmith doing a thermal survey of his house, then ignoring the results; Gast explaining how BP invented the concept of the personal carbon footprint, which regularly blows audiences’ minds.

The audience is smart; they just don’t have context. When a joke about greenwashing or carbon footprints lands wrong, it’s usually not because the audience is uninformed or indifferent. It’s because they lacked the context. The correct response isn’t to talk down to them. It’s to remember what it felt like to hear it for the first time.

Treat audiences like friends. Gast’s approach is to walk in thinking, “These are my friends, and I can’t wait to tell them this.” It sounds simple, but it’s a nifty reframe from how most sustainability professionals enter a room — pre-defensive, braced for skepticism, ready to justify the subject matter before they’ve even started. Goldsmith called it “grappling” — you have to be seen to be working through this alongside the audience, not delivering verdicts from on high.

Permission to feel. Goldsmith’s corporate pitch is essentially this: “I give them permission to feel joy even if they’re scared. I give them permission to have fun even if the subject matter is dry.” His goal: Make climate seem real and relatable and part of their lives rather than something on a spreadsheet.

This was one of the more useful climate communications conversations we’ve had. These aren’t just comedians talking about their craft. They’re practicing something most of us in sustainability struggle with: meeting people where they are. We can learn a lot from these funnymen. Seriously.

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