Late night is heating up. That is, shows like “Saturday Night Live,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” have been focusing on global warming in the past week.
Beer jokes. Al Gore with some startlingly profane rappers. And, of course, digs at President Trump.
We don’t usually get a lot of laughs out of climate change, a topic that gets precious little airtime, even on the broadcast news shows. But comedy shows riff off the news, and there has been a lot of climate science in the news recently, especially the grim report from a United Nations science panel predicting enormous weather disasters by 2040, well ahead of previous estimates.
And then there was Mr. Trump, who gave an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday in which he again expressed his doubts about climate change, even suggesting that it may reverse itself. (Not going to happen, Mr. President.)
He came back to the topic on Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press, explaining that “I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture.” (For the record: The percentage of scientists whose work supports the overwhelming evidence for climate change is itself overwhelming.)
Last Saturday’s episode of “SNL” had not one but two segments that dealt with climate change, including that rap number about trees (with a cameo by Mr. Gore).
The program also devoted a “Weekend Update” report to the United Nations climate findings.
Michael Che described the problem of climate change communication this way: If people see it as being about losing everything, “Nobody cares about everything,” he said. “People only care about something.” His example: If Fox News said that climate change would take away “all the flags and Confederate statues, there’d be recycling bins outside of every Cracker Barrel and Dick’s Sporting Goods.”
Mr. Che had similarly pointed suggestions about building interest in climate change among black people and women. For those, you’ll have to watch the video.
Stephen Colbert jumped on Mr. Trump’s statements about climate change, saying: “After a year of massive storms causing untold damage, and our glaciers just shrinking in every direction, Trump was still ambivalent on the concept of climate change. He told the reporter, ‘You have scientists on both sides of the issue.’ That is true, there are scientists on both sides. On one side, all the scientists. On the other, one guy who runs a blog called RealTrueAmericanScienceEagle.jesus.”
He also cited a study that we wrote about in The New York Times that suggests climate change could raise the cost of beer as it shrinks barley harvests. “Or as the brothers at Sigma Phi Epsilon put it, ‘Climate change just got real.’”
Trevor Noah jumped on the beer news, too. “Climate change: Sometimes it feels so hopeless, all you want to do is get drunk and forget about it,” he said. “Well, sadly, that won’t be an option, because of climate change.”
To his credit, Mr. Noah talks about climate change fairly often.
Does joking about climate change blunt the message that it is a threat, even a crisis?
Hardly, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. He noted that broadcast media rarely talks about the topic, and it barely came up during the 2016 presidential debates. So for many television viewers, he said, seeing a segment on “Weekend Update” or “The Late Show” means “millions of people just had a conversation or watched on television discussions about climate change that they otherwise never get exposed to.”
What’s more, his center’s own research, he said, shows that “comedy is a really effective means to engage people,” and especially young people, in what he called “a sideways way.” He said that “through humor, people can deal with very difficult and scary topics that people will tend to ignore or avoid.”
The challenge, he suggested, is making any of this funny. “God knows, it’s pretty hard to laugh about most of the things that are going on today.”
Late-night television has long been topical, said Bill Carter, who used to cover the industry and has written two books about the struggle for dominance. But the rapidly spinning news cycle of the Trump administration has focused the comics’ attention on news out of Washington more than ever before, he said. And that fills a need.
“The audience is in a state of anxiety. The country is in a state of anxiety,” he said. “They’re watching the shows to get some relief.”
It helps, he added, that “this administration produces more risible material than any one in history.”
Links
- Talking to young people about climate change? Try to make them laugh
- The Science of Satire: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as Sources of Public Attention to Science and the Environment
- For Clinton and Trump, There’s Little Debating a Climate Change Divide
- Scientific consensus: Earth's climate is warming
- ‘I Don’t Know That It’s Man-Made,’ Trump Says of Climate Change. It Is.
- Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040
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