Every time I read a newspaper on accelerating climate change, I get anxious. This week I decided to explore can humour make it easy to tackle the brain fog that is climate? Let me begin with a story.
Imagine vast un-inhabited spaces, the fierce hot wind blowing through a desolate landscape, few people sheltering in place. This is not a dystopian sci-fi film but some photographs from the Australian bushfire from January 2020. It all started with less than usual rainfall.
Statisticians will tell you, correlation is not causation, let the graph below sink in. The bushfire is accelerating and the forests getting drier, but we still can't quite be certain it is caused by climate change! Cue climate skeptics.
If the graph doesn't quite convince you, see this, maybe Aaron Sorkin will. Now the evidence is clear that fear mongering on climate is pushing people into an anxiety loop, which is not ideal if you want to make them act? The solution, if I may borrow it from the recommended clip from The Newsroom, is to use humour as a defence mechanism and to get people involved in climate change. Did you see the humour as a defence mechanism tactic? Turns out humour can really help us make sense of climate change.
Research by Christopher Skurka showed that humour can be a useful tool to encourage engagement with a crisis as doom and gloom as climate change. Another professor Beth Osnes who uses theatre and dance for creative climate change communication says, “Climate change isn't a laughing matter but sometimes you have to laugh at your pain to get a solution.” Does it hit you? Laugh at your pain to get a solution? Because “Comedy equals tragedy, plus time.”
Even so, humour may allow people to process information differently. Humour can help us stay calm under unfathomable pressure. To think, to stay in control of anxiety, to be intact. Two interesting people spent most of their time dissecting the unused superpower of humour and they wrote a book about it – Humor, Seriously. For people like me who feel they are not stand-up comedians, definitely require more insights. Regardless of the ability to crack jokes, we can all be open to humour. It can be powerful in helping people understand and think about something. So much so that, even the catastrophic truth of climate change may benefit from this superpower.
Want to reduce cognitive load?
Look at these practical steps curated by Netflix to help reduce cognitive hurdles and start acting, little by little.
Some technical terms we thought we could talk about:
- Climate change: long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns.
- Cognitive load: the amount of information working memory can hold at a time.
Read More Here:
- Arctic Circle by Alex Hallat (fascinating comic strips mirroring the ravages of climate change)
- You've got to laugh: why a sense of humour helps in dark times
- A little humour may help with climate change gloom
- Mental health and our changing climate
- Making climate change funny
- Under the sky we make: How to be human in a warming world
Contribution by Fazli