By their sense of humour you will know them

Not sure but you might need a hot beverage warning for this one. Or maybe antiemetics.

I know this will come as a surprise, nay, a shock to most of you but I am quite partial to comedy. It is my firm belief that laughter is not only the best medicine and a great weapon against grief, but also an excellent way to make life a bit brighter and we all need this right now, when the reins seem to be in the hands of markedly humourless people. Or so I thought.

Obviously, climate activism is serious business because the existential catastrophic climate change that activists are fighting is serious business. The word existential is the clue. And yet, it appears that activists are not completely devoid of a sense of humour. If you feel generous with the definition of “a sense of humour”, that is.

From the FT: “There was only one way to win the online game played by hundreds of staff at asset manager Abrdn: convince the board to cut oil and gas investments, even if it meant distracting them with pastries. The game was sent to employees by climate activists and was quickly banned on company servers.”

The story: a former brand manager now fully dedicated to climate activism and a person I hesitate to call a comedian made a videogame. It’s called Asset Manager Quest and its aim, per that person whom I hesitate to call a comedian, is “to annoy fossil fuel financers.”

Obviously, this is a most foolproof recipe for massive comedy success. After all, good comedy is all about annoying people and not, under any circumstances, making them laugh, including at themselves. Those two even have their own company. It’s called Serious People. It has a website. And three employees, per LinkedIn.

It is clearly a serious company but also a company with a wonderful sense of humour. Just look at their fonts. Serious People is so serious, indeed, that they made a list of emails of Abrdn employees and sent them the Asset Manager Quest game. Abrdn, by the way, is the former Standard Life Aberdeen, for vowels’ sake. Oh, and how did they find the emails? Well they “used publicly available information to work out the email addresses.”

Anyway, they then boasted that several hundred employees played the game — and they also garnered a lot of praise from likeminded individuals on LinkedIn, and I must take a moment to mention that I hadn’t spent that long on LinkedIn in… ever. But it was worth it because I learned a lot. I learned, for instance, that Serious People is in the business of climate technology product manufacturing.

I honestly have no idea if this is another demonstration of humour or a genuine description, where the product is that videogame and the Ogilvyland fossil fuel fair. The fair features rides such as Coal Mine Mountain, described as “A thrilling ride through our clients’ latest coal mines. If the fast drops and rickety tracks don't take your breath away, the emphysema surely will!” ROFL.

There’s also Woody’s Woodland Fire Rescue, where you can experience “A wild escape from a woodland fire. Hop in a helicopter and sing along to the enchanting songs of Woody the Squirrel and his burning woodland critter friends.” LOL and double LOL. I am genuinely crying with laughter.

I’ll spare you the rest of the rides but Inman and Frost didn’t stop there. They actually sent fake invites to that fair to some Ogilvy employees. The FT, which reported on that, didn’t say if those poor people went to the fun fair, though. They only added a picture to their article and the picture looks like this. I am lost for words and I think I heard a clump of neurons shrivel and die from despair, screaming “You will never be this funny!”

Image credit: FT

Those neurons were right, of course. I will never be as funny as people using playground-level humour for the purpose not of entertaining but annoying other people. No one can be that funny (except Antonio Guterres but he’s not doing it on purpose so it doesn’t count.)

All comedy annoys someone, of course. But it’s rarely on purpose. No comedian in their right mind would consciously seek to degrade their audience and shame them into a certain kind of behaviour. But climate comedians are an entirely different breed. Their purpose is exactly that: degrade an audience and shame it into, er, pressuring their employers to stop financing oil and gas development. Or something.

I’m a great believer in the power of shame as a motivational tool. Shame works. But for shame to work, it needs to be the right dose, added to the main course of comedy. Most of us who were lucky enough to be born with a sense of humour know this instinctively. There’s a not so fine line between joke and insult. Alas, the Serious People appear to have a deficiency in the humour department so they’re overcompensating and the result is Woody the Squirrel and his burning woodland critter friends.

That’s about as funny as a perforated gastric ulcer and it is also offensive because it was produced by people born in the great tradition of humour giants such as Jerome K. Jerome and P.G. Wodehouse, who knew how to poke fun at injustice and tragedy, and they did it brilliantly. I won’t even mention the many brilliant stand-up artists the UK has given the world — the latest crop of whom have also been infected with the climate crusade virus, I’m sorry to say. This is one of the most unforgivable sins of the climate crusaders. They are ruining humour and comedy for the rest of us — while being inadvertently hilarious, to be fair.

Yet that’s the wrong kind of hilarity. It’s the kind of hilarity recently demonstrated by a former Bulgarian PM who posted on X that he was attending the Trump inauguration where he was going to talk to “senators, congressmen and future members of Trump’s cabinet”. And then he was caught on camera among the, well, general public — after he posted his own photo of the, well, general public “quarters”. It’s the kind of hilarity that makes you first smile and then wince a little from second-hand embarrassment. It’s a form of mental pollution.

Still, it must be said that lame videogames are better than aggressive street-gluing. At least they don’t block traffic. As for the chances of that sort of campaign succeeding in making more people freak out about the climate, I’d call them highly debatable.

For a palate cleanse, one of my all-time favourites from Gabriel Iglesias. That’s how comedy works.