In late April, Emily Strasser found herself on a virtual stage, telling jokes about AI, gnomes, and her three-year-old nephew to dozens of strangers. Six months earlier, she would have called it a nightmare. Public speaking ranks low on her list of favorite activities, and standup comedy with its potential for public humiliation seemed unimaginable. Yet she signed up for a comedy class—not out of a lifelong dream, but because the daily dread of political and planetary freefall had become untenable.
From Despair to the Comedy Stage
In 2019, a convergence of grim climate predictions catapulted Strasser into despair. She climbed out after six months by finding a community that shared her grief. But relief proved temporary. Last year, she spent months interviewing scientists who set the Doomsday Clock, adding nuclear winter and bioweapons to her panic list. Determined not to numb out or come unglued, she discovered an unlikely antidote: climate comedy. She signed up for a course called Sustainable Stand Up, developed by improv consultant and comedy coach Belina Raffy.
Raffy created the course over a decade ago after growing concerned that dire warnings about climate change were making people shut down in fear and guilt. She wanted to help those working on social and environmental issues find humorous ways to share serious messages. Since then, she has taught the course internationally to NASA climate scientists, human rights lawyers, Extinction Rebellion activists, and humanitarian workers. This iteration was for members of the Climate Psychology Alliance, therapists who help people navigate the psychological toll of the climate crisis.
The Science of Laughter and Resilience
We know laughter has physical and emotional benefits. Promising evidence suggests learning comedy is good for mental health: it helps people reframe difficult experiences, build social bonds, and gain confidence. The UK’s National Health Service has even begun offering standup classes as a mental health intervention through its social prescribing program, where patients are referred to non-clinical services like exercise or art classes. Strasser wondered if comedy could help people show up with more resilience when facing collective, political, and planetary difficulties.
The seven-week online course culminated in a live online show. For the first class in mid-March, six participants Zoomed in from their homes. Karen Taylor, a trauma therapist from Hartford, Connecticut, was drawn to combining play and creativity with climate psychology. Jessica Bleuer, a drama therapy professor in Montreal, hoped comedy would help her communicate across political differences. Jeremy Lehrer, a Brooklyn therapist, wanted to express his values in comedic form. Strasser was the only non-therapist.
Finding the Funny in the Dark
The first exercise wasn't comedy but a rant. Raffy asked each person to pick something that made them grumpy—a six out of 10, not the red-hot thing. They took turns ranting for a minute each: perimenopause, entitled people, customer service chatbots. After each rant, Raffy asked the group to describe the beautiful thing the ranter cared about. Strasser's group told her she cared about labor justice, human connection, communication, and flexibility. It made her feel like a very good person. Then Raffy assigned homework: write three jokes. Strasser struggled, wondering if she even knew what a joke was.
Raffy teaches what she calls loving comedy, an approach informed by the psychology of humor. Not all humor is good for us. Humor used to amuse and affirm others, build social bonds, and regulate emotions is psychologically beneficial. But humor that mocks others, overly disparages the self, or avoids facing difficult feelings is detrimental. The aim, Raffy said, was to come from a place of: I love myself. I love the audience. The system is silly. And share what would be awesome.
Joke Structure and the Circle of Expectation
One lesson on joke structure stuck with Strasser. Raffy explained that first you create a circle of expectation. Then, in the punchline, you leap outside that circle while still playing by its rules. Strasser immediately thought about AI. She wanted to rant about AI's sins, from labor exploitation to amplifying nuclear war risks. But Raffy advised picking a six, so Strasser focused on one fear: that in a world of large language models, writing will become like knitting—a beloved craft but an optional hobby—rendering her job as a writing professor obsolete. If the expectation is AI's inevitable takeover, what would its opposite look like? What if knitting became a graduation requirement? She imagined universities indoctrinating students in the radical woke ideology of knitting, transforming women's work into the latest alpha male status symbol. She built to a requisite penis joke: Spin that fiber long and thick. Hot. Then after a pause: I'm gay, but even I can't resist the insulating power of a wool sweater.
It felt good to transform a helpless thought into something silly and playful. The political potency of comedy is ancient and evergreen, from the archetypical trickster to the medieval court jester to Stephen Colbert. But making light of nightmares isn't easy, especially for beginners. Raffy wanted sets to land on some sort of possibility or call to action that was also light and playful. The class struggled, their sets veering into speeches, rants, or laments.
Finding the Tear Fairy
Bleuer beautifully captured collective despair in an early version of her set. As a Latina Canadian whose best friend is from Iran, me finding hope looks like—she paused, searched the ceiling as if to find hope scuttling there like a spider. The group smiled as they saw the joke coming. She tried again, haltingly: like um, I—I find hope in—the um … OK, so I cry. So I cry. They released their laughs in recognition. Then she spun into a poignant defense of crying as a healthy response to the world. There's a whole world in a tear. I speak the truth in a tear. The world is really sad. Let's cry together. Raffy reminded them this was a comedy course and offered suggestions for finding something funny in a tear. In her final set, Bleuer imagined a movement of crying activists: Oh fuck! The crying activists are back! They teared us again, she acted out an irate legislator arriving to his office in sopping clothes. Everyone laughed.
Rebecca Weston, co-executive director of Climate Psychology Alliance North America, took the class in the winter. She said part of authoritarianism is shutting down the parts of ourselves that can remain open, joyful, and connected to others through play. When that gets more rigid and brittle, huge parts of our own capacity suffer. But while watching horrors unfold in Minneapolis and doing rapid response work in New York, Weston's fear and anger sometimes felt too big for the class. She considered dropping out.
Too-Big Anger and a Protective Spell
Strasser's own too-big anger flared during a one-on-one coaching session two weeks before the final show. She had built her set using her teaching, knitting, and three-year-old nephew Jack's love of gnomes to comment on AI, toxic masculinity, environmental concerns, and immigration justice. But she struggled to find an ending. Raffy suggested inviting the gnomes, her nephew, and the manosphere bros to engage in some beautiful possibility together. Strasser felt flaming righteous rage and cried right there on Zoom. She didn't want those hateful, dangerous men anywhere near Jack—a sweet, goofy kid who stomps through puddles, meows to her cats over FaceTime, and investigates birdhouses for resident gnomes. She wanted to protect a world where he could be playful, kind, curious, and brave. Underneath the anger was a ferocious instinct to protect. What was funny about that?
When she finally had an idea, she hurried to dismiss it. Absolutely too vulnerable. Surely she would not let them see the silliest, witchiest, most cringy and earnest version of herself. She scrambled for other ideas. Some days it feels like we're sharing the worst version of a collective bad dream—no one prepared us to face the climate crisis, fascism, and the AI assault all at once. We don't have the skills. We are not the kind of people who … I am not the kind of person who does standup. But there she was, feeling faint, searching a grid of unfamiliar faces for the few guests she had invited. And then she did the thing she had not wanted to. She asked a bunch of internet strangers to join her in a big, goofy spell of protection, one she had originally made up for her three-year-old nephew on the solstice. Stop it! they yelled together, to Kristi's Gnomes and all the others spreading fear and hatred, thrusting their palms forward in the gesture of halt. She felt ridiculous and powerful all at once. Jack was there on the screen, in a sun-drenched living room with his parents. He shoved his hand out, too, grinning and yelling.
The Power of Play in Dark Times
Doing amateur standup is a silly, tiny thing. It won't save the planet and it doesn't replace vital work of resistance, legislation, and new world-building. Strasser is still angry and scared as hell. But standup helped her reconnect to her young, silly, tender heart and showed her capacities she didn't know she had. Stretching to find funny, authentic ways to talk about the things that keep us up at night, the therapists and Strasser found a way back to themselves. Bleuer, who dubbed herself the niche superhero the tear fairy in her set, said these times are meant to make us feel confused and there are so many competing needs. Maybe re-tapping into what we know about ourselves prepares us for resistance better. The comedic process reaffirmed the political importance of her work as a therapist. Maybe we leap outside the circle of our own expectations and find we were already there.
Strasser geared up part two of the spell: To all other gnomes, to the immigrants and queer people and trans people, to anyone who wants to care for this earth and each other and knit together, we say welcome. And they flapped their hands rapidly at their shoulders, ululating their hearts out.
