by Caitlin Atkins, Environmental Humanities MA student 2024/25
Why did the chicken cross the road? It didn’t, it was a battery hen.
This terrible, awful dark joke started off a 20-minute set I had the pleasure of performing for members of the CEH back in August. The show – ‘Bad Activism: Anxiety and Procrastination in the Flagellation Age’ – did get funnier, I promise, but gallows humour is difficult to escape when looking the state of the world and it felt important to acknowledge that right off the bat.
The performance was for my MA Environmental Humanities dissertation (the irony that the culmination of my academic life so far was a comedy show was not lost on me), where it was accompanied by a critical commentary on how it engaged with EH research on comedy. I never would have performed a set – it didn’t feel “proper” enough – without the encouragement of the staff who teach on the EH MA. After I spent ages wittering on to various people about how I’d love to see more research on eco-comedy and how interesting the growth in the field has been over the past couple of years, my supervisor turned around and said “it sounds like you should just perform it yourself.” Working out the kinks of what a comedy set as a dissertation project would look like took a bit of time and negotiation, but it felt so good and so core to the principles of EH creative practices to stretch my own definition of what I’d thought academia could be.
Setting out on the project, I wasn’t massively bothered by the performance side of it. I figured that if it wasn’t funny or I wasn’t very good I’d have a lot to write about and the essay was the important bit, the academic bit. But I didn’t anticipate how cathartic the creative process of writing the set would be and how much the experience would stay with me. The advice for writing good comedy is the same as for writing good fiction: write what you know. I had the rare luxury of knowing in advance who my audience would be, so I didn’t have to worry about coming face-to-face with a climate denier or anti-environmentalist on whom the entire performance would be lost. I could be entirely and authentically myself.
I started out trying to write about multispecies theory and then thought about all of the weird and mind-bending facts that have cropped up in my classes – did you know that the majority of an octopi’s neurons are located in its tentacles and thus their arms have more independence of thought than their heads? What strange non-human creatures! But while this might raise a smile, it had no substance, nothing deeper than ‘gosh isn’t the natural world odd.’ So I put off writing in favour of researching more – a failsafe whenever academic projects aren’t going quite how you’d hoped. In my research, I nabbed an interview with self-titled “climate comedian” Stuart Goldsmith, a majorly successful British comic who exclusively performs environmentally themed comedy. Talking to Stuart was incredibly helpful for the project for so many reasons, but one moment in particular stood out after he kindly offered to give feedback on some of my jokes: “Cut the whimsical bullshit.” And he was right – by thinking about facts and theories I was dancing around the heart of environmentalist issues and avoiding my own experiences as an environmentalist. I then began to think about EH as a field interested in activism and how does it fail to reach outside of its own bubble, how does it avoid becoming an echo chamber? Does talking within the echo chamber make what you’re saying any less valuable? Is it okay to preach to the choir? In the combination of these questions, the heart of the show emerged and I realised I had to centre it on my personal experiences as an activist because it is inseparably intertwined with my experience of studying EH.
The show was a success and everyone, staff and students, were so incredibly supportive; it was probably the nicest audience I will ever perform to. My biggest takeaway from it, perhaps unsurprisingly, was that everyone should have a go! In whatever tiny way you can manage, whether that’s jotting down a quip, coming up with a pun, or trying out an open mic, the experience of laughing at my own activism brought me more agency than I’ve ever felt signing yet another petition or boycotting yet another brand. These things are important, of course they are, but they can be draining and despair is difficult to fend off. Writing comedy broke through the drudgery that the everyday experience of being dedicated to certain values and causes can often look like and reminded me, in a genuinely constructive and hopeful way, why I continue to try and be an activist, however often I fail my own expectations.