Stand-up for the planet: cracking climate jokes – DW – 07/18/2025

DW

6 days ago

By day Matt Winning works on climate policy. By night, he's turning scientific data into jokes. Fusing razor-sharp research with dry Scottish wit, Matt uses stand-up to make the climate crisis feel less distant, more human, and a lot harder to ignore.
Transcript:
Matt Winning: "Everybody, I think, would like me to tell a great story about how I thought, 'right, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna change the world by making everybody laugh about climate change and getting the message out there.'"
What actually happened was, as a comedian, I ran out of things to talk about. I thought to myself, 'well, what do I know that other people don't know about? What can I talk about? What can I bring to the table?'"
I'm here to put the meat into climate change, the warm glow into global warming and arguably 'are you mental' in environmental. … I have a PhD in climate change policy, which means I'm the kind of doctor, if you're ever on a flight and you have a heart attack, I will rush to your side, but only to berate you for flying." (Laughter) "Why are you on the plane? Shhhhh"
Meet Matt Winning. A funny-man from the Scottish town of Paisley who describes his job — or one of them at least — as a bit of an oxymoron.
Matt Winning: "I'm an environmental economist… environmental, yay, economist, no thanks. It's a bit like a human rights—lawyer. Still a lawyer… Or a cocktail—sausage." (Laughter)
As you might be starting to gather, Matt is also a comedian. He crunches scientific data by day and hits the UK comedy circuit by night. In both cases, hoping to share an understanding of just how human behavior is changing the climate on the planet we share.
Matt Winning: "When I was born, climate change was just nascent in the public's awareness. During the short time that I have grown from a baby to an adult through school university, fallen in love and had a baby of my own and experienced everything I have ever experienced in my life, including all of the Fast and the Furious franchise. During that time, over 55% of all CO2 emissions that have ever occurred had occurred."
Through humor and banter with his audiences, he draws giggly lines between the choices many of us make in everyday life and the searing heat waves, storms, droughts and wildfires that have become a new kind of normal. And he finds funny ways of explaining how different actions have different levels of impact.
Matt Winning: "Here they are, in descending order. Number four… it's don't have a cowman, it's eating meat. That's about 10% of the average person's UK emissions. Number three… Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Yes, it's a plane." (Laughter) "And it's the most emissions-intensive thing you can do. You'd have to not eat meat for two years to offset the emissions of a flight to NY and back. At number two, it's beep-beep – driving. U-turn ahead. It's 30% of UK emissions, by far and away one of the highest actions you can do. Now… does anyone want to guess what number one is?"
Hold that thought because we'll come back to it later. I'm Neil King and in this episode of Living Planet, we're asking whether making the climate crisis the butt of jokes can make people think about how they might be unwillingly contributing to the problem. And who better to give us an insight than a comic-slash-scientist, who didn't originally set out to be either.
Matt Winning: "My first career was actually… I came out of university and I worked for an investment bank for a year."
Neil King: The dark side…
Matt Winning: The dark side of the table. Then I went and did a master's degree in economics, so my background was in law and economics. It's a very difficult word to say in a Scottish accent 'LAW', and a lot of people don't understand. In fact, I remember telling some German people at one point, I did law and economics, and they thought I said war and economics and there was a lot of confusion."
But even studying economics and law with an L, didn't make climate science coupled with climate comedy an obvious next step.
Matt Winning: "I didn't know where I was necessarily going to go with my career, but things had sort of sparked my interest at university around climate change. And I found it fascinating as a thing that was happening right now, that was being debated from a legal perspective. And I did a course on the economics around environmental issues in climate. I just found it really, really interesting."
So interesting, in fact, that he ended up doing a PhD in climate policy. Which explains half of what he does now. But not all of it.
Matt Winning: "About nine months into my PhD, I realized I really needed to be out of the house every evening doing a hobby. And I started a stand-up comedy course at the university."
He didn't start off by making climate his comedy target, and had in fact already been delivering other less scientific routines for several years before he made the shift. That was almost a decade ago. The Paris Agreement had just been signed and the warming of our world was making big headlines. So taking rising temperatures onto the stage would be tapping into some kind of Zeitgeist, but knowing climate was a hard sell, Matt had a healthy dose of doubt.
Matt Winning: "I thought, 'well, I guess I know a lot about climate change. This is what I spend every day of my life thinking about and working on, but nobody wants to hear about climate change.' You know? That was my viewpoint even, back then I was like, wow, that's not going to work though. Nobody's going to actually want to hear about climate change. And also, how are you going to make that funny?"
Which is something many people, including myself, might be wondering. Because the impacts of rising global temperatures are so widespread and so serious, that it's hard to imagine it could even have a funny side.
Matt Winning: "But the more I thought about it, the more I was like, well, I might as well give it a try. I've got this knowledge, I've got this passion. I might as well just see what happens. And it might be terrible and people might hate it, and I might never do comedy again, and I might give up and that will be fine. But at least I'll have given it a shot."
Now, people say 'so it's happening, yeah, but maybe it's something else? Maybe it's natural factors?' But actually, NO." (Laughter) "Basically all of the other natural factors that would influence climate change, things like the sun or volcanoes, would have ever so slightly cooled the planet over the last 150 years, so humans are actually causing about 110% of climate change." (Laughter) "People say 'you can't give 110% of climate change.' It turns out you can." (Laughter) "Stop doing it."
The first three months I was, it was the hardest three months of anything I've ever done because I was dying on stage. People hated it at first because I'm floundering about trying to figure out how to do this, and I would just keep going back up on stage. I had a presentation. I was like, these are the things I'm gonna talk about and I'm gonna try and make them funny."
Anyway, we'll have a recap of the science and impacts, some stuff about the psychology, individual action and then we'll have a summary. And I know what you're thinking: In the future with climate change won't every day be summery? No!"
At first people were amused by the persistence of it where I was like, I'm going be talking for an hour here and it's going to be about climate change. And people found that sort of amusing in itself. But that only gets you so far."
Since the 1900s we have increased our use of fossil fuels by about 8 or 9 times and that is mostly coming from coal, gas and oil, which was actually the original name of the band Earth, Wind and Fire." (Laughter)
He spent months redefining his on-stage persona and writing enough material to put together that he was happy with. And then he took the show to the annual month-long Fringe festival in the Scottish city of Edinburgh. For a baptism of fire in the shape of 25 performances.
Matt Winning: "People often ask me when I do this, they say 'What can we do about it?' It's difficult as a member of the public to know what you're supposed to do about climate change, you're told lots of confusing things, aren't you? You're told to recycle more. Change your lightbulbs. Go back in time and kill yourself before you were born." (Laughter)
By the time the month was over, he hadn't bombed or been heckled off the stage. Instead, he'd actually found that audiences were both interested and engaged. It was the confirmation he needed to keep going.
Matt Winning: "People kept saying afterwards, 'oh, I thought I was gonna hate that. But it was really informative, you know, I felt like I learned something and it was real. And I laughed.'"
Which might sound unlikely given the serious and widespread impacts of rising global temperatures. So how did he set about extracting humor from something so earnest?
Matt Winning: "I found it really difficult. And what I did was I ended up going and talking to other comedian friends of mine who have nothing to do with climate change and just talking through some of the things with them, you know, some of the topics, whatever it was, either some of the impacts and heat waves and other things like that as well as, you know, sea level rise, but also talking about solutions around electric vehicles, whatever."
Max Boykoff, who chairs the environmental studies program at the University of Colorado Boulder, says humor by its very nature offers different ways into difficult issues — and another way to understand the world we live in.
Max Boykoff: "At first glance, people may think of climate-themed comedy as mixing oil and water. I mean, there is a danger of trivializing very important issues in our society. However, the way in which we treat it is that climate comedy becomes a vehicle for effective communication about climate change. One of the biggest challenges that we have fundamentally about addressing climate change is getting more and more people to talk about it. And the way in which we think about getting more and more people to talk about it is that then provides avenues for greater engagement and action. And we focus in on comedy as a vehicle because it helps lower defenses, it actually helps open up spaces for open conversation."
Conversations that, let's face it, can be hard to have. Because people tend not to like being told to think twice about flying on holiday, buying the clothes they want from where they want or eating whatever takes their fancy. It's a topic that divides politicians, societies and also sometimes even families. And Max sees humor as a way to dismantling such fences.
Max Boykoff: "Comedy has the power to help us find common ground together. And in these times of polarization, of retreating to certain groups that we may agree with, and we get into these echo chambers that comedy has this possibility of bridging together and helps recapture what can be seen at times as a missing middle, where people are discussing different perspectives."
He has spent around a decade working with students looking to learn how jokes can be used as a creative climate communication tool. In that time, he and his colleague Beth Osnes, who has a background in theatre, dance and the history of comedy, have helped to seed performances across the US. But also beyond, in places like the UK and Bangladesh — which experts say has been at the frontline of climate change for decades.
The duo is also part of a project called Inside the Greenhouse at the University of Colorado Boulder, which offers a space for experimentation, and brings seasoned and aspiring climate comics together. The idea is to communicate this abstract and controversial, many-tentacled issue in accessible and creative ways.
Earlier this year, to mark Earth Day, they hosted their 10th annual climate comedy show, with performances from both students and professionals — including New York comic Nat Towsen.Max Boykoff also sees comedy as a way to build rather than dismantle communities and to confront an issue that is often otherwise delivered with a wagging finger or apocalyptic undertone. Both of which leave many people feeling helpless, hopeless or just aggravated.
Max Boykoff: "In these high stakes, high profile, highly politicized challenges, where climate change has the potential to overwhelm everyday people, humorous treatments can lower those defenses, can open us up, increase accessibility to complex, often distant dimensions of climate change just by making them relatable. Also, the live shows have great value because that collective participation is really important. We don't feel so isolated that we feel that we're relating to each other on what's funny."
He says climate stand-up is not only about poking fun at what governments or societies could be doing better. It can also be a way of talking about what is going right, and the part people might be able to play in positive action.
Max Boykoff: "An additional piece of all this is that with comedy, you know, we can think about the various ways that make us laugh, but we had added this layer of engaging with climate change content and pointing towards solutions as well. And so we over time had been working with comedians and working with our students to point towards spaces where our students could talk about solutions and talk about actions to alleviate the negative impacts of climate change."
Matt Winning: "I thought about it, so what's the environmental impact of coffee? And it turns out if you have a coffee, just a splash of milk, you double the emissions. And if you have a latte, because you're a big baby…" (Laughter) "… and you need a glass of warm milk…" (Laughter) "… turns out, your emissions are 15 times higher." (Laughter) "I miss it soooo much."
And speaking of babies… do you remember the countdown to the most damaging things individuals can do for the planet?
Matt Winning: "Now… does anyone want to guess what number one is? Any guesses from the audience? 'Farting?' I like it… but incorrect." (Audience shout) "'Procreation?' Procreation! Correct. I mean it's the most posh way I've ever heard it said, but absolutely."
One of his shows is built around the smaller and bigger ways he could reduce his emissions footprint enough to feel okay about becoming a father — something he explains he always knew he wanted. Despite the fact that having children goes hand-in-hand with increased use of resources, energy consumption and waste generation. Albeit it to massively varying degrees depending on where and how a child is raised.
Matt Winning: "A wise person once said 'I believe the children are our future.' A climate scientist? No… Whitney Houston. And I agree with Whitney, but I also think it depends on what kind of a child you have. If I have a vegan clever child who somehow invents the world's first zero carbon airline, yeah, they're already offsetting themselves. So I guess what I'm trying to say… is don't have too many children, but also you don't have to have no children. Just have better children." (Laughter)
As a father himself, he weaves elements of his family life into his routines. But he also acknowledges how hard it can sometimes be to find the levity in a subject that touches his life and the decisions he makes. In the same way it touches those of billions of others.
Matt Winning: "You know, you have to almost stand back and go well how do we look at this from a different, you know, from 90 degrees over here? You have to treat it like a very separate thing and not pay attention too much to the emotional side of it. And so it took a little while to learn to teach myself how to be able to create some distance from it. And it's quite cold blooded, it's quite heartless. I have to really disconnect a part of my personality to be able to view it in a lens that's just purely about writing jokes. It's such a sort of split personality that I've had to approach this with."
Neil King: "The way you described the split personality, I think that's quite an interesting analogy to how we are as humans in the climate crisis. Because every day, I mean, we all do it, we do stuff that's bad for the climate, and then we try and do things that don't harm the climate so much, or we try and invest in things that are positive, but there's cognitive dissonance that's going on all the time. It's like an undercurrent that nobody can get out of, and sometimes we just try and ignore it, or not think about it. But you, you're going right into that current each time, right?"
Matt Winning: "Yeah, the cognitive dissonance around climate is so enormous, really. And almost necessary as a way of survival. I mean, we saw with… the pandemic as well. We had to find ways of coping, and that was a very short amount of time comparatively to what we're dealing with climate change, which is obviously the entire globe slowly changing over our entire lifetimes and becoming more dangerous. So we have to find ways to cope. I think I've sat with it enough, that I sort of know I'm doing it and I can decide when to do it and when not to."
A lot of people ask him how he manages to spend so much time thinking about climate and working on a subject they say they actively try not to think about.
Matt Winning: "Why we do nothing about it? I think climate change is a bit like religion in a couple of ways. First of all, it's like religion in that you're told to make sacrifices, give up your sinful pleasures, and you might save the world. Stop having steaks, stop flying to Ibiza, stop stealing cars, stop all the fun stuff and we'll be alright in the end. I don't know which side God would be on in the end if I'm honest, because the guy does like a big old flood." (Laughter)
Part of Matt's aim is to deliver the information in ways that help break through that cognitive dissonance. To offer a level of clarity that can prompt others to make climate-positive decisions. But for all the comedy bells and whistles, the facts underneath have to stand up to scientific scrutiny. Each crack, he says, is triple-checked for accuracy. So much so that when he's writing a show, he starts by drafting a public lecture on climate change, and then goes back and packs it full of jibes and jabs. Be it about his self-proclaimed hatred for SUVs, how the hardest part of trying going vegan in January was calling it veganuary without wanting to punch himself in the face. And of course, flying…
Matt Winning: "A return flight from London to New York, right? So there and back, um, is the equivalent emissions of you having to go vegan for two years. To offset that, right? So like, and it's the equivalent of the only way of offsetting that, you know, sort of the, the equivalent emission saving would be to do all of your recycling for five years. For that one return flight to New York. So I, you know, people just don't, I don't think quite grasp the magnitude of what causes more problems than others. And it's a very, you know, it's a very western, decadent thing to do. Most people who have ever existed on the planet, haven't stepped foot on an airplane. So it's a tricky one. Now I've come up with a solution." (Laughter)
"Right. Hear me out. This is my solution. Because we need to sort of reduce demand. Stop people flying away. Some people are afraid of flying. I think we just need to make more people afraid of flying. I'm thinking glass floors on planes, actual snakes on a plane. The only in-flight entertainment is the film . Babies crying across the entire plane." (Laughter/Applause)
He is always looking to hit a rhythm between jokes and facts. Between getting people to crease up laughing and sit up and listen. The ratios vary from show to show and person to person. But Max Boykoff says his research into the effectiveness of creative climate communication such as comedy reveals positive results. Using audience surveys, he and his colleagues have established that poking fun at global heating has multiple benefits.
Max Boykoff: "When we've been surveying the audiences that have come to the shows, they've given us feedback that comedy is helping enhance their awareness, their feelings of moving from paralysis to feelings of action, that it's helped dislodge that feeling of anxiety and a movement towards engagement and problem solving. And it's increased the salience of climate change and the connections to many other activities and facets of our lives. And so that's consistently been what we've been hearing from audiences."
But who are those audiences? Matt says people often suggest he is probably preaching to the converted rather than tickling a whole new congregation.
Matt Winning: "Now… it's weird that, because clearly I'm not a preacher, am I? I'm just a guy standing on stage, and it just so happens that when I come and talk to people, they sort of gather around my feet." (Laughter) "To learn from the wisdom I have to impart." (Laughter) "I'm not saying I'm Jesus. I am 33 and I'm trying to save the world." (Laughter) "Got a beard. Love Easter eggs." (Laughter) "Got 12 friends and I don't trust one of them." (Laughter) "And if I'm honest, my dad is quite controlling. He does nothing on a Sunday."
Climate protest actions and the backlash against them, both societally and in some cases, legally, might suggest that there is a clear delineation between those who do and do not care about climate. With not much in-between. But research suggests that is not the full picture and that the public is split into six different groups: Alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, dismissive. With most people somewhere in the middle.
Matt Winning: "I won't go into detail too much, but basically I dismay the idea that people are either converted or sceptics, and those people are very much either end of the spectrum and what you have in between that is about 50% of the public or more who think it's an issue, but aren't really engaging with it. And that's who I'm trying to write the comedy shows for. How do you engage the people in the middle who go, you know, I think this is an issue, but we also, we've got these other problems, whatever it is, and we should focus on them a little bit more. Or maybe climate change isn't as immediate an issue as something else."
Most people are concerned. I had someone the other day and I asked him about it – they were concerned – and I said 'what's stopping you becoming alarmed?' And he said 'it sounds exhausting'." (Laughter) "Now there's a reason why… a number of reasons… one is that climate change is very far away, it's always in the future, it's happening to people far away, or it's happening to polar bears… do any of you hang out with polar bears? I do. It's the one friend I don't trust." (Laughter) "Very different views on a number of issues. You could say we are…" (Laughter) "bear opposites."
For Matt, pretty much anything is fair game, if it can be made funny.
Matt Winning: "The problem I have is when I'm like, how do I explain the concept of stranded oil and gas assets in a really funny way? The setup is too complicated and requires too much information to make the jokes worth it. That's the hard parts. That's the main thing where I'd like to talk about this topic and I think it's an important topic, but I really struggle to make it as engaging as I would like. And that's going to take me time… occasionally… I can put something that's much heavier or difficult to talk about towards the end of the show where it doesn't need as much in the way of comedy. And it won't have a punchline at the end of it. Very occasionally. 'Cause I'm like, I think I actually want this piece of information that's maybe quite hard, to sit just for a moment."
Which is not to say the end of his shows spiral into pure doom and gloom. The comedy heart beats too hard for that. But the whole thing is a balancing act. Educational and entertaining. Honest and humorous. Academic and amusing. He hopes that by the end of it, people will go home with a new level of knowledge and feeling about the scale of the problem, and an understanding that everyone can make a contribution toward positive change. Leading by example all the way.
Matt Winning: "I have cut down my dairy though, right down, dairy's right down and I only drink oat milk, which is really weird when I have it on my porridge every single morning 'cause it feels like I'm the most Scottish man in the entire world… I didn't actually realize this until quite recently. I watched a Netflix documentary about how they make oat milk, and I hadn't realized that they actually separate the oats, the mothers from the children at quite a young age, and then they keep the mothers pregnant and that's porridge." (Laughter) "That's a weird bit, isn't it? That is an odd turn." (Laughter)
And in the very best of scenarios, there might even be audience members who feel motivated to get started on doing something constructive themselves.
Matt Winning: "Engage, but engage in whatever way you feel comfortable, engaging in. You don't feel like you have to engage in a way that other people do. Find your own path. So just, you know, even if it's small, even whatever it is in your community, try and do something. Try and engage with other people. Try and think of this as a bigger problem that makes you engage with society, engage with community and be part of something. Because otherwise, we'll never actually solve this in time."
Two questions he says he gets asked a lot, are whether there is still hope and what we can do about it.
Basically people want me to say, uh, either say yes we're screwed so that they, you know, don't have to do anything about it, or they want me to say, no, it's fine, so they don't have to do anything about it. The answer is neither of those things. The answer is that we're somewhere in the middle. The other question, what can I do about it is we actually need to do stuff about it…"
He believes the global community will have solved climate change by the end of the century, in the sense that emissions will have been reduced to the point they need to be at. But questions whether it will be a last-minute dash that will cause greater levels of suffering to life on Earth between now and then. Or whether the world will get its act together sooner rather than later and make use of the solutions out there. That part of the story has not yet been written, but he hopes that spreading the word through creative humor plays its part in getting the message to places that are otherwise hard to reach.
Matt Winning: "I'll just keep getting out there and keep talking to people about it and hopefully, hopefully slowly make my small piece of a difference that may well cascade in ways that I can't foresee, you know? Yeah. I might do something, inspire somebody that goes and does something much more impactful than I could ever do, and if I do that, then great. I'm very happy to play our role in where humanity's heading. I think that's the main thing that kinda gets me up every day. I can see where we have to get to and I'm happy to play whatever role I can on pushing us there."