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Stay Cool: Why Dark Comedy Matters in the Fight Against Climate Change
How gallows humor can bolster us to confront global warming.
We’ve all seen the headlines: oceans rising, historic heat waves, mass extinctions, climate refugees. It feels overwhelming, like nothing can make a difference in combating this ongoing global catastrophe. How can we mobilize to save the world when we feel this depressed?
Stay Cool enjoins us to laugh our way forward. Human beings have used comedy to cope with difficult realities since the beginning of recorded time—the more dismal the news, the darker the humor. Using this rich tradition of dark comedy to investigate climate change, Aaron Sachs makes the case that gallows humor, a mainstay of African Americans and Jews facing extraordinary oppression, can cultivate endurance, persistence, and solidarity in the face of calamity.
Sachs surveys the macabre tradition of laughing during great suffering, from the Black Plague to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906—and offers some of the earliest examples of superlative dark comedy. He also explores how a new generation of activists and comedians are deploying dark humor to great effect, by poking fun at older people’s apathy about climate catastrophes, lambasting oil corporations’ “eco” rebranding, and even producing an off-Broadway dystopian comedy called “Sea Level Rise.” Sachs offers suggestions for how environmentalists can use dark comedy first to boost their own morale, and then to reframe their activism in more energizing and relatable ways.
Environmentalism is probably the least funny social movement that’s ever existed. Stay Cool seeks to change that. Will comedy save the world? Not by itself, no. But it can put people in a decent enough mood to get them started on a rescue mission.
We’ve all seen the headlines: oceans rising, historic heat waves, mass extinctions, climate refugees. It feels overwhelming, like nothing can make a difference in combating this ongoing global catastrophe. How can we mobilize to save the world when we feel this depressed?
Stay Cool enjoins us to laugh our way forward. Human beings have used comedy to cope with difficult realities since the beginning of recorded time—the more dismal the news, the darker the humor. Using this rich tradition of dark comedy to investigate climate change, Aaron Sachs makes the case that gallows humor, a mainstay of African Americans and Jews facing extraordinary oppression, can cultivate endurance, persistence, and solidarity in the face of calamity.
Sachs surveys the macabre tradition of laughing during great suffering, from the Black Plague to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906—and offers some of the earliest examples of superlative dark comedy. He also explores how a new generation of activists and comedians are deploying dark humor to great effect, by poking fun at older people’s apathy about climate catastrophes, lambasting oil corporations’ “eco” rebranding, and even producing an off-Broadway dystopian comedy called “Sea Level Rise.” Sachs offers suggestions for how environmentalists can use dark comedy first to boost their own morale, and then to reframe their activism in more energizing and relatable ways.
Environmentalism is probably the least funny social movement that’s ever existed. Stay Cool seeks to change that. Will comedy save the world? Not by itself, no. But it can put people in a decent enough mood to get them started on a rescue mission.
- GenresNonfiction
176 pages, Hardcover
Published April 4, 2023
4 people are currently reading
43 people want to read
About the author
Aaron Sachs
13 books15 followersResearch and Teaching Interests
My general focus is on nature and culture: I wander through parks, cemeteries, and wilderness areas (often with my kids), stare at landscape paintings and photographs, and re-read Thoreau, all in an effort to figure out how ideas about nature have changed over time and how those changes have mattered in the western world. My primary appointment is in the History department, but my Ph.D. is in American Studies, and I remain fully committed to interdisciplinary work. In my graduate teaching, I regularly work with students not only in History but also in English, Science and Technology Studies, History of Architecture, Anthropology, and Natural Resources. On the undergraduate level, I teach courses ranging from an overview of environmental history to seminars on consumerism, the American West, the meanings of wilderness, and the road trip in American culture.
Another strong interest is in creative writing, and I happily serve as the faculty sponsor of a radical underground organization called Historians Are Writers, which brings together Cornell graduate students who believe that academic writing can actually be moving on a deeply human level. I also seek to support innovative history writing through a book series at Yale University Press, called New Directions in Narrative History (John Demos and I are the co-editors).
At Cornell, I’m also the founder and coordinator of the Cornell Roundtable on Environmental Studies Topics (CREST), which holds lunchtime events on campus and also sponsors evening sessions where we discuss relevant books and articles that we’ve read in common. And I’m currently serving as a house fellow at Flora Rose House on West Campus, where you’ll sometimes see me at the dining hall, trying to lasso my three young children as they attempt to lure unsuspecting undergraduates into a food fight.
My general focus is on nature and culture: I wander through parks, cemeteries, and wilderness areas (often with my kids), stare at landscape paintings and photographs, and re-read Thoreau, all in an effort to figure out how ideas about nature have changed over time and how those changes have mattered in the western world. My primary appointment is in the History department, but my Ph.D. is in American Studies, and I remain fully committed to interdisciplinary work. In my graduate teaching, I regularly work with students not only in History but also in English, Science and Technology Studies, History of Architecture, Anthropology, and Natural Resources. On the undergraduate level, I teach courses ranging from an overview of environmental history to seminars on consumerism, the American West, the meanings of wilderness, and the road trip in American culture.
Another strong interest is in creative writing, and I happily serve as the faculty sponsor of a radical underground organization called Historians Are Writers, which brings together Cornell graduate students who believe that academic writing can actually be moving on a deeply human level. I also seek to support innovative history writing through a book series at Yale University Press, called New Directions in Narrative History (John Demos and I are the co-editors).
At Cornell, I’m also the founder and coordinator of the Cornell Roundtable on Environmental Studies Topics (CREST), which holds lunchtime events on campus and also sponsors evening sessions where we discuss relevant books and articles that we’ve read in common. And I’m currently serving as a house fellow at Flora Rose House on West Campus, where you’ll sometimes see me at the dining hall, trying to lasso my three young children as they attempt to lure unsuspecting undergraduates into a food fight.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 31, 2024
~~185th climate book~~
tl/dr: the most bizarrely packaged brownwashing book I've ever come across.
~~~~~
Somehow I keep forgetting that Abraham Lincoln, William Wilberforce, and Harriet Beecher Stowe were only minor characters in abolition. David Ross Locke and his satirical Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby were the real heroes, which is why we have international holidays, parades, schools, hospitals and museums named after them. Lincoln was such a self-righteous stick in the mud, am I right? If only he'd had a better sense of humour, we might have abolished slavery ages earlier; of course once Locke showed up he turned the ship around straight away.
It's just like the suffragette's critics said: they took themselves much too seriously and were entirely too didactic about their own freedom and humanity. If only they could have told jokes about themselves, women would have got the vote sooner, and by now we'd have had a woman President and PM.
In fact, when you think about it, that's why monarchies disappeared around the globe as soon as court jesters showed up. Comedy is the only really effective tool we have against any kind of oppression, and if you're not using it, then any delays in success for your cause are your own damned fault.
~~~~~
I get really tired of books like this one. Sure, yes, humour is fine and good; black people and Jews used a lot of dark humour in some very horrible periods to cope and survive. It's one tool in the toolbox. But to write an entire (most of a) book (it's only about 100 pp) about how environmentalists are too idealistic and self-righteous and preachy and that's why climate change hasn't been solved yet because obviously it would all be fixed by now if only the greens were better at self-deprecating and/or gallows humour isn't just insulting and offensive, it's not supported by the very tenuous evidence he offers in this book, and it's completely inconsistent with every mass movement in history.
The reason we know about Lincoln and Stowe and I bet you've never heard about Locke is because most people respond more strongly to impassioned idealistic speech about such issues than jokes, dumbass; the reason mass movements against things like slavery, misogyny and climate change take such a fucking long time is because it is really hard to change minds and hearts and get people to move beyond the status quo, not because humour is some mind-hacking magic that can short-cut the whole process. The humour helps people to cope, which is great! But it isn't necromancy.
He misquotes his sources (I'd read many of them already and I know they don't make the claims he uses them to support). His arguments are crap. His jokes are cringey. At one point he appears to make the claim that the Yes Men are solely repsonsible for the wave of fossil fuel divestments in post-secondary schools in North America, completely excluding the vast (unfunny) organizing by students and faculty making those demands over several years. His claims about what "environmentalists" say or do are just lazy stereotypes and make me wonder if he's ever actually interacted with any.
No one's ever demanded to know if I drove to a climate protest or scolded me if I did. The signs at climate protests have always used jokes. Almost every climate activist and worker I know is already more concerned about impacts to humans than other species and has been for a long time. All of the environmentalists he criticizes are fictional, mostly from TV shows. The actual environmentalists he includes are either misquoted or largely disprove his argument, given their massive followings compared to the comedians he lionizes. He actually writes a serious critical argument about how the Lorax -- the kids' picture book by Dr. Seuss -- should have had a more nuanced critical take on capitalism. Are you for real?
He is completely ignorant of climate science; I'm not sure he's ever waded within viewing distance of an IPCC executive summary, let alone any of the source science, so he continually makes claims popular amongst climate deniers like "climate change will be great for agriculture in Siberia."
I am tired of assholes who claim to be on the "right" side blaming climate activists for how long it's taking to solve climate change, as if the only barrier were tone and messaging, and not the dedicated work over decades of fossil fuel companies to silence and discredit them, nor the work by petro-states to punish, imprison or even kill them. And I am really tired of these people getting book contracts when if their argument had even a shred of validity, Climate Stew would have a larger following than Greta Thunberg.
Be honest, friends: you've never even heard of Climate Stew.
This is a bad book. The angry marginalia probably makes it a bad candidate for the donation pile, so I might rip it up for art supplies.
~~~~~
I like jokes. I tell a lot of jokes about climate change. I'm willing to use any tool that might work, even a little bit. Below is a link to one speech I gave locally that had people coming up to tell me how funny it was years after I gave it. Jokes are great!
But jokes are not climate kryptonite, and the intractability of climate politics is not the fault of climate activists' failure to tell jokes.
https://blog1.andreamcdowell.com/2019...
tl/dr: the most bizarrely packaged brownwashing book I've ever come across.
~~~~~
Somehow I keep forgetting that Abraham Lincoln, William Wilberforce, and Harriet Beecher Stowe were only minor characters in abolition. David Ross Locke and his satirical Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby were the real heroes, which is why we have international holidays, parades, schools, hospitals and museums named after them. Lincoln was such a self-righteous stick in the mud, am I right? If only he'd had a better sense of humour, we might have abolished slavery ages earlier; of course once Locke showed up he turned the ship around straight away.
It's just like the suffragette's critics said: they took themselves much too seriously and were entirely too didactic about their own freedom and humanity. If only they could have told jokes about themselves, women would have got the vote sooner, and by now we'd have had a woman President and PM.
In fact, when you think about it, that's why monarchies disappeared around the globe as soon as court jesters showed up. Comedy is the only really effective tool we have against any kind of oppression, and if you're not using it, then any delays in success for your cause are your own damned fault.
~~~~~
I get really tired of books like this one. Sure, yes, humour is fine and good; black people and Jews used a lot of dark humour in some very horrible periods to cope and survive. It's one tool in the toolbox. But to write an entire (most of a) book (it's only about 100 pp) about how environmentalists are too idealistic and self-righteous and preachy and that's why climate change hasn't been solved yet because obviously it would all be fixed by now if only the greens were better at self-deprecating and/or gallows humour isn't just insulting and offensive, it's not supported by the very tenuous evidence he offers in this book, and it's completely inconsistent with every mass movement in history.
The reason we know about Lincoln and Stowe and I bet you've never heard about Locke is because most people respond more strongly to impassioned idealistic speech about such issues than jokes, dumbass; the reason mass movements against things like slavery, misogyny and climate change take such a fucking long time is because it is really hard to change minds and hearts and get people to move beyond the status quo, not because humour is some mind-hacking magic that can short-cut the whole process. The humour helps people to cope, which is great! But it isn't necromancy.
He misquotes his sources (I'd read many of them already and I know they don't make the claims he uses them to support). His arguments are crap. His jokes are cringey. At one point he appears to make the claim that the Yes Men are solely repsonsible for the wave of fossil fuel divestments in post-secondary schools in North America, completely excluding the vast (unfunny) organizing by students and faculty making those demands over several years. His claims about what "environmentalists" say or do are just lazy stereotypes and make me wonder if he's ever actually interacted with any.
No one's ever demanded to know if I drove to a climate protest or scolded me if I did. The signs at climate protests have always used jokes. Almost every climate activist and worker I know is already more concerned about impacts to humans than other species and has been for a long time. All of the environmentalists he criticizes are fictional, mostly from TV shows. The actual environmentalists he includes are either misquoted or largely disprove his argument, given their massive followings compared to the comedians he lionizes. He actually writes a serious critical argument about how the Lorax -- the kids' picture book by Dr. Seuss -- should have had a more nuanced critical take on capitalism. Are you for real?
He is completely ignorant of climate science; I'm not sure he's ever waded within viewing distance of an IPCC executive summary, let alone any of the source science, so he continually makes claims popular amongst climate deniers like "climate change will be great for agriculture in Siberia."
I am tired of assholes who claim to be on the "right" side blaming climate activists for how long it's taking to solve climate change, as if the only barrier were tone and messaging, and not the dedicated work over decades of fossil fuel companies to silence and discredit them, nor the work by petro-states to punish, imprison or even kill them. And I am really tired of these people getting book contracts when if their argument had even a shred of validity, Climate Stew would have a larger following than Greta Thunberg.
Be honest, friends: you've never even heard of Climate Stew.
This is a bad book. The angry marginalia probably makes it a bad candidate for the donation pile, so I might rip it up for art supplies.
~~~~~
I like jokes. I tell a lot of jokes about climate change. I'm willing to use any tool that might work, even a little bit. Below is a link to one speech I gave locally that had people coming up to tell me how funny it was years after I gave it. Jokes are great!
But jokes are not climate kryptonite, and the intractability of climate politics is not the fault of climate activists' failure to tell jokes.
https://blog1.andreamcdowell.com/2019...
February 19, 2023
A great entertaining book on the importance of (dark) humor in dealing with the environmental crisis. The book focuses more on dark humor in general, especially linked to racial problems in history. In the last half it is more linked to climate problems. I was surprised about how short the book was, it's really a quick read.
Thanks to the publisher & NetGalley for an ARC to read.
Thanks to the publisher & NetGalley for an ARC to read.
April 3, 2023
Stay Cool is rather tongue-in-cheek, droll commentary, I feel. For instance, how does one hitch up the terms, ideas and concepts embodied in the words: environmentalists, global warming and climate change, with interjected comedy, or as the author prerfers to specify, dark or gallows humor? For the answer author Aaron Sachs brings you, you'll just have to read the book.
In truth, I wasn't so sure what to make of this book as number one, I never seriously thought much about these earth issues and was one reason for wanting to read it to see what all the hoop-lah has been about.
However, the historical account of the development of humor, especially of the dark variety, kind of sidetracked me. It is interesting of course, as humor is one of my 'things' as is history. Eventually, I got how it all tied in with the main topics of environmentalists, and so on.
The reader will discover that even the title is 'punny,' so if the issues make you hot under the collar, I recommend staying attuned to stay - ing cool, especially with the growing amount of purgatorical reams of rhetoric available in the world on these issues.
I like that Sachs even has some suggestions on how to embrace, rather than fear, the changes of Earth's climate. In so doing, a person will no doubt learn to "Stay Cool'.
~Eunice C., Reviewer/Blogger~
January 2023
Disclaimer: This is my honest opinion based on the complimentary review copy sent by NetGalley and the publisher.
In truth, I wasn't so sure what to make of this book as number one, I never seriously thought much about these earth issues and was one reason for wanting to read it to see what all the hoop-lah has been about.
However, the historical account of the development of humor, especially of the dark variety, kind of sidetracked me. It is interesting of course, as humor is one of my 'things' as is history. Eventually, I got how it all tied in with the main topics of environmentalists, and so on.
The reader will discover that even the title is 'punny,' so if the issues make you hot under the collar, I recommend staying attuned to stay - ing cool, especially with the growing amount of purgatorical reams of rhetoric available in the world on these issues.
I like that Sachs even has some suggestions on how to embrace, rather than fear, the changes of Earth's climate. In so doing, a person will no doubt learn to "Stay Cool'.
~Eunice C., Reviewer/Blogger~
January 2023
Disclaimer: This is my honest opinion based on the complimentary review copy sent by NetGalley and the publisher.
August 13, 2023
This book serves more as an extended syllabus than an in-depth conversation about the myriad issues it touches upon- which at 100 pages, makes sense, but also is a bit of a let down. Rather than standing alone as a text, it will send you through the author’s expansive bibliography. Would probably use in teaching as a way to get conversation started and to send students to other sources for more info.
May 30, 2023
Some say you need two bookmarks for Stay Cool, one for the text and one for the footnotes!
January 5, 2024
Appreciated the new viewpoint and opening my mind up to climate comedy. Will come in handy!
August 4, 2024
3,25. Un llibre divertit, curtíssim (però amb molta bibliografia) que aporta un punt de vista nou i l'explica molt bé. Útil.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews