Why Comedy Works for Climate Stories and When It Does Not

In 2020, actor Shayan Bayat read a fake news bulletin for the opening of Climate Change is a Good Thing, an episode of Pressure Point, a satirical series by our founder Scott Renyard. 

“In a recent press conference, Canadian officials have indicated that they will be favouring domestically produced respiratory hazards over American smoke imports,” he said.

The line came out of a hard shoot. Renyard was filming that montage with a small crew because of the COVID outbreak, “while choking on smoke coming across the border from US wildfires,” as he put it. He calls the joke “a moment of inspiration.”

It is a silly line about something serious. We think that is exactly why it works.

Most of what we stream on The Green Channel is documentary, and most of it is serious, because the subjects are serious. However, we also stream comedies and there is research that helps explain why a joke can sometimes reach people that a documentary does not.

What the research says

In 2013, Paul R. Brewer and Jessica McKnight showed 424 young adults a climate change clip from either The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, while a control group watched a clip from Finding Bigfoot. The people who saw the satirical news came away more certain that global warming is happening. The researchers also found that the effect did not vary with viewers’ political beliefs.

In a study published in 2018, a team led by Christofer Skurka at Cornell University tested short videos made by Second City Works, in which a weatherman forecasts extreme weather linked to climate change. One version was ominous, one was neutral and one was funny, with a weatherman who was clueless about the signs. Viewers who found that version funny were more likely to say they would take part in climate activism and the humour worked best with 18- to 24-year-olds. There was a trade-off, too. The funny video made people less scared and they rated it as less informative.

Then the same team ran the experiment again. In a 2022 replication, they did not get the same main results. The funny video only changed how risky climate change seemed to the youngest viewers, aged 18 to 21. We are glad they published the second paper, because it shows that one funny video does not work on everyone in the same way.

At the University of Colorado Boulder, environmental studies professor Max Boykoff and theatre professor Beth Osnes took a different approach. Their students perform climate comedy on stage, and their show, Stand Up for Climate Comedy, reached its ninth year in 2024. In a blog post on the project, Boykoff and Osnes reported progress in awareness, in people’s sense that they could do something and in how they felt about the issue. They also wrote that “many challenges still remain.”

Why comedy can reach people

Osnes has been clear that the point is never to make fun of the problem. “Our goal in doing this is not to make light of the seriousness of this issue,” she said in 2019. Caty Borum, who runs the Center for Media & Social Impact at American University, argues that comedy can persuade us because “we’re being entertained and because we’re feeling emotions of play,” as she told Popular Science in 2023.

Our own view is a little simpler. 

A documentary about wildfire smoke asks you to sit with the problem. A joke about smoke tariffs lets you laugh first and (we hope) the problem stays with you after the laugh is over. Both have a place on our platform. And on a heavy news day, the joke may be the one you can prefer to watch.

Where climate comedy goes wrong

The Cornell team pointed to one limit of their own study. Jeff Niederdeppe, who oversaw it, said the humour they tested was “very silly,” with the weatherman as the butt of the jokes.

We think the target of the joke matters more than anything else. For example, after a wildfire disaster, the fires themselves are anything but funny and the people who lose their homes to a wildfire should never be the punchline. 

Three eco-comedies to watch on The Green Channel

The first one is Pressure Point: a series of mishandled events, Renyard’s 10-episode satire about environmental issues in British Columbia. It works through fictional interviews with politicians and senior bureaucrats. 

Another one is Rise of the Eco-Tariffists, a 28-minute comedy in which two agents, one Canadian and one American, meet near the border to discuss upcoming tariffs on Canadian environmental goods. Renyard shot the whole 28-page script in one day and nesting Great Blue Herons forced the crew to pack up and move soon after they had set up. In July 2026, Shayan Bayat won a Leo Award for his lead performance in the film.

You can also watch Zero, a 13-minute dark comedy about a zero waste serial killer with “one bloody mission to combat climate change and overpopulation.” The crew made the film as a zero waste production and the Environmental Media Association awarded it a Green Seal. It was directed by Mike Johnston, a co-founder of Vancouver-based Studio 104 Entertainment. If you like your comedy dark, Zero is the one to start with.

Watch our eco-comedies online

Pressure Point, Rise of the Eco-Tariffists and Zero are streaming now on The Green Channel, the environmental documentary streaming platform. 

If the news has been heavy lately, one of these films is a good way to stay with the subject and still laugh a little.