Finding Humour in the Environmental History of the Climate Crisis

Scroll this

This is the introductory post to the Finding Humour in the Environmental History of the Climate Crisis series edited by Nuala Proinnseas Caomhánach.

A polar bear, climate scientist, a rotifer, and a climate denier walk into a bar…

This series stemmed from the curiosity to explore how environmental historians engage with humour, satire, irony, and silliness in and out of the archive when thinking with and about the climate crisis. Does humour in the face of the climate crisis allow us to explore environmental humanities research in novel and innovative ways? As Emily Zong and Daisy Bisenieks attest, the “incongruity between jocular feelings and the gravity of extinction highlights humour’s ambivalent potential for violence and subversion.”1 Central to the formation of this series are questions about how we can use humour to help us examine the relationship between the human and nonhuman and what we can learn when applying the categories of humour as an analytical lens and methodology to examining the climate crisis. 

a photograph of a protest sign that says "our planet is getting hotter than Cole Sprouse"
Image by Markus Spiske, Sep 20, 2019 [https://www.pexels.com/photo/climate-street-earth-posters-2990611/]

This series was inspired by George Orwell’s 1945 essay, “Funny, But Not Vulgar” and Nicole Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism (2018).2 Orwell argued that a “thing” is funny when it upsets the established order in some way. Humour is “the debunking of humanity,” and nothing is truly funny except in relation to human beings, from PizzaRat to the 2013 Carnival Triumph cruise ship disaster. Seymour asks us to rethink the environmental movement’s reputation for doom and gloom and to explore the role and potential of humour to engage an audience who may otherwise overlook the crisis due to ennui or fatigue.

a color photograph of a plant in a blue mug that says "grow, dammit!"
Image by Alpz, Oct 5, 2019. [https://www.pexels.com/photo/green-fern-plant-in-pot-3032271/]

By considering humour as a critical register for the field of environmental history, this series argues for its potential to offer narratives that highlight the approaches humans have developed to deal with the climate crisis. The authors for this series aim to account for human and nonhuman otherness in the age of extinction. As Ursula Heise wrote, “Biodiversity, endangered species, and extinction are primarily cultural issues, questions of what we value and what stories we tell.”3 Ecocritic Michael P. Branch proposed the concept of environmental humour as a means to challenge the earnestness of environmental writing. Branch asked why we do not employ more levity and humour within scholarly work and rejected the notion that humour subverts and contaminates urgent action.4 Yet much more remains to be done in the contemporary quagmire of misinformation, fake news, and post-truth.

The authors of this series explore the category of humour as a means to examine how the human and nonhuman co-exist in an age of extinction. Over the course of the series, different genres of storytelling from television shows, memes, poetry, and illustrations will interrogate the sticky tension of how we interact with climate change. Each post aims to stretch the intellectual space of possibilities to allow self-reflection on our current moment within the field of environmental history and humanities.

1. Emily Yu Zong and Daisy Bisenieks, “Dark Humour and Invasive Species Storytelling in the Age of Extinction,” Journal of Australian Studies 49, no. 1 (2025): 4-21.

2. George Orwell, “Funny, but Not Vulgar, 1945. https://orwell.ru/library/articles/funny/english/e_funny#google_vignette.

3. Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, (University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5.

4. Michael P. Branch, “Are You Serious? A Modest Proposal for Environmental Humor,” in Greg Garrard (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (2014; online edition, Oxford Academic, 16 Dec. 2013), https://doi-org.proxy.library.nyu.edu/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199742929.013.021.

Cover image: Photo by Magda Ehlers

The following two tabs change content below.

Nuala Caomhanach

Nuala Proinnseas Caomhánach is an Assistant Professor in the International History and Politics Department of the Geneva Graduate Institute and a research scientist in the Invertebrate Department at the American Museum of Natural History. She teaches and researches at the intersection of environmental history, history of science, law, and the climate crisis.

NiCHE encourages comments and constructive discussion of our articles. We reserve the right to delete comments that fail to meet our guidelines including comments under aliases, or that contain spam, harassment, or attacks on an individual.