Stay Cool: Why Dark Comedy Matters in the Fight against Climate Change

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Aaron Sachs is a professor of nineteenth-century American history, the grandson of a Reform rabbi and biblical scholar, and an amateur stand-up comedian. What better person to write a book about how traditions of dark humor can enable us to face our present-day plague of locusts—that pesky little thing called the climate crisis?Full disclosure: I was poised to like Sachs's Stay Cool even before I had it in my hands, given my own scholarly interest in how contemporary environmental activists and artists have deployed irreverence, camp, and other humorous modes to counter the not-totally-unfounded stereotype of environmentalists as gloomy-and-doomy sticks in the mud. Sachs, though, follows in the footsteps of Joseph Meeker by adopting a comic modality in order to quite literally meditate on our survival in the face of looming existential crises. Specifically, Sachs treats dark humor and climate change as matters of intellectual as well as practical concern, and the tenor of his prose will appeal to members of academia and the general public alike. Indeed, the book is only about a hundred pages long, features light footnotes, and, as the subtitle suggests, is less a learned study than an historiographic or even journalistic op-ed.So, why should we consume and/or practice dark humor when we are confronted by a reality increasingly marked by floods and fires? Sachs counts the ways it can help us. One is that it is a morale booster and a coping strategy. Another is that dark humor is a tool we can use to create momentary distance in the midst of fraught debates and to acknowledge important realities that we might otherwise repress. Finally, it is a means of building camaraderie with others who are feeling what you're saying (or saying what you're feeling). "Gallows humor should be second nature (as it were) to environmentalists," says Sachs, despite their reputation for lacking a sense of humor. "What could be more natural than death? Accepting death is the most basic way of upholding limits, of acknowledging the finitude of our planet's resources" (37). In this sense, maybe dark humor is the environmentalist stance par excellence.Maybe it is also the default stance of those who have faced a lifetime of oppressive conditions. Accordingly, Stay Cool points back to the precedents of African American and Jewish traditions of dark humor, including during the civil rights era and around the Holocaust, respectively. Smartly, Sachs doesn't simply parallel these traditions with climate change humor but identifies intersections between them. For example, he unearths an environmental consciousness in the work of Richard Pryor (25) and draws provocative parallels between dependence on the labor of enslaved persons and dependence on fossil fuels (39). The book boasts several fascinating and funny historical anecdotes, too, some of which humor scholars might not have heard before. We learn that André Breton's Anthology of Black Humor was at the printer when Paris fell to the Nazis—and, no, it didn't make it through the censors, suggesting just how threatening dark humor can be to the Man. Sachs also highlights the satirical work of the pre–World War II antimilitary organization known as the Veterans of Future Wars (94) and 1960s-era singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer, who targeted air pollution and nuclear fallout (70–71), both of which demonstrate how dark humor has helped folks muddle through all manner of geopolitical crises throughout history.All these ideas are delivered in a lively, personable voice (Sachs tells us about everything from the deaths of his parents to his interfaith marriage) free of academic jargon. The text is punctuated by his own jokes, limericks, and other bits, as well as historical cartoons. He thereby offers exactly what he's arguing for. Whether these elements will actually make you laugh is, of course, subjective. In any case, Sachs admits to his penchant for "dad jokes," as wholesome as they are predictable.Likewise, the book's weaknesses are relative. For one thing, Stay Cool can give the impression of insensitivity from a social justice standpoint. The book (not unlike this review) employs a broad "we," and that approach sometimes glosses over inequalities, such as when Sachs declares that "the planet is going to be just fine. . . . It's just the human beings who seem to be going to Hell" (1). Many of the communities that suffer most from extraction and climate change, like those comprised of Indigenous peoples, crucially don't believe in the separability of "the planet" and "human beings" in the first place. But as Sachs points out, "All forms of dark comedy are risky and challenging" (75). They risk offense. They risk feeling "too real" or "too soon." Perhaps most crucially, they risk feeling frivolous in the face of overwhelming, serious issues.Further, the book's breezy, economical nature means that it can't offer in-depth analyses of environmental humor or extensively theorize about why we haven't had more of it to date. (For that, you could go to scholarly works like Meeker's The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic [1974], Massih Zekavat and Tabea Scheel's more recent edited volume Satire, Humor, and Environmental Crises [2023], or even my book Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age [2018]). Stay Cool also overlooks some important recent work in the field, such as Danielle Fuentes Morgan's 2020 monograph Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century. Finally, Sachs doesn't answer the biggest question I regularly receive: are humorous modes actually effective in terms of spurring us to action around climate change? Of course, Sachs is less concerned with action per se than with psychic and spiritual survival. He wonders how we can avoid wanting to "throw [ourselves] in front of an SUV" every time we read the latest IPCC report. Shouldn't we? Well, according to this author, "we need you to help push the [Sisyphean] boulder and maybe teach some swimming lessons" (92)—you know, to prepare for all the floods and rising sea levels to come. "Always look on the bright side of death!" (63). This is the crux of Sach's genesis narrative for a new birth of dark comic takes on the end of the world as we know it and the real-world impact (or not) of our scholarship.