There once was a turkey ...

Wallace Heim writes:

As if the American holiday of Thanksgiving wasn't hard enough on turkeys, the pejorative use of the word gives the Greengrok blog the chance to stage a contest for the 'Environmental Turkey of 2012' . The prize is an iPad. The catch is that nominations have to be in the form of a limerick.

Their sampler:

Two thousand twelve, oh what a mess
Dirty ads, gridlock, but I digress
When it comes to green
Little progress was seen
Who’s the turkey to blame for this mess?

You have until 26 November to submit a turkey. 

more ...

german version of the post about climate change jokes

A post from a couple of years ago, the joke climate changes, has been translated into German by Monik Gupta and now appears on the website Öko-Fakt as Das Witze-Klima verändert sich. more ...

the rally for sanity

'The battle for the American mind right now is between talk show hosts and comedians,' said a 26-year-old doctoral student from Richmond, Va. “I choose the comedians.” (Daily Dish more ...

too crazy for cartoons

The Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles tries hard to think of something as stupid as ignoring the conclusions of 98% of scientists who work in this field. His answer:

Gary Larson did a cartoon about two guys crawling across a desert, dying of thirst. They have come upon a drinking fountain. One is letting it run without drinking and saying he's going to let it run until it gets cold. That's about as sensible as the debate on climate change.

H-t: ClimateProgress

Update: ChrisD at CP points to Toles' climate change cartoon two days ago: “First climate change came for Russia, but I didn’t care because I wasn’t Russian…” more ...

party on

This blog has a long-running interest in climate-change jokes. So it was good to hear, at the end of tonight’s episode of the new Radio 4 comedy series Party, that next week the clueless young political idealists are going to address the question of climate change. more ...

new year's resolutions

In 2010, this blog resolves:

a) not to use the phrases 'saving the planet', 'wake-up call', 'science says', 'scientists tell us' or 'last chance'.

and

b) to unearth more climate-change jokes. more ...

no-one laughs at the comic

The last 10 years have all been in the top 15 hottest years ever. You can catch the section from Question Time, where Melanie Philipps argues that climate change is a scam and temperatures are going down, here. Fortunately, Marcus Brigstocke is on hand to talk some sense.

An odd situation: the audience greets the comments of a supposedly serious columnist with laughter and listens to the words of a comedian with serious attention. more ...

yippee

Protest Naomi Klein style.

'The only kind of protest she likes is the Yippie kind, theatrical enough to be entertaining and self-mocking enough to dilute the earnestness to a level that she can tolerate.' more ...

tea time

'For most of Top Gear's six million viewers the show is not really about cars at all,' writes Janice Turner, 'We make tea during the technical blah.' more ...

game

Leading climate-change comic, Marcus Brigstocke, has a new panel show where everyone has a proper old dingdong. more ...

that executive experience in full

Jason Jones interviews the current Wasilla mayor, Dianne Keller, for The Daily Show.

Jason Jones: Do you think being a small-town Mayor prepares you to be president of the United States?
Mayor Dianne Keller: An unequivocal yes.
JJ: How?
Mayor: How?
JJ: Let's say you have a problem with the fire department? What would you do?
Mayor: The city of Wasilla doesn't manage the fire department.
JJ: Ok, fine. Let's say there's something wrong with the school system?
Mayor: We don't do the school system.
JJ: Just pick any social service.
Mayor: We don't do social services in Wasilla...
JJ: Um, what do you do?
Mayor: What do we do in Wasilla?
JJ: Take me through the Mayor of Wasilla's day.
Mayor: (nod, nod, nod), Just different, different things on different days...um, well Mondays at 10 o'clock we always have a staff meeting, and then, um, um, (long pause) every Thursday is a check-signing day, so I sign all the checks for the city of Wasilla--pay the bills...

HT for link and transcript: Crunchy Chicken more ...

key attribute

On last week's Saturday Night Live, writes Tina Brown, Sarah Palin showed 'she had a key attribute for long-term political survival: the ability to pretend she finds humiliation amusing.' more ...

one per cent between them

Tina Fey did a B.A. in drama at University of Virginia, then took night classes at Second City, the improvisational theatre in Chicago, where she discovered she wanted 'to devote my life to improv'.

The Pew Research Centre has found that awareness of Fey's Sarah Palin sketches was running at 42%, only one per cent lower than Palin's own TV interviews. It's also had a significant impact on Palin's favourability ratings.

Since Palin has said that global warming is 'just God hugging us closer', Fey's performance may be the most influential role so far played by an actor in relation to climate change.

The Wiki entry has a good quote from a Fey interview about what she learnt from improv.

'When I started, improv had the biggest impact on my acting. I studied the usual acting methods at college—Stanislavsky and whatnot. But none of it really clicked for me. My problem with the traditional acting method was that I never understood what you were supposed to be thinking about when you’re onstage. But at Second City, I learned that your focus should be entirely on your partner. You take what they’re giving you and use it to build a scene. That opened it up for me. Suddenly it all made sense. It’s about your partner. Not what you’re going to say, not finding the perfect mannerisms or tics for your character, not what you’re going to eat later. Improv helped to distract me from my usual stage bullshit and put my focus somewhere else so that I could stop acting. I guess that’s what method acting is supposed to accomplish anyway. It distracts you so that your body and emotions can work freely. Improv is just a version of method acting that works for me.' more ...

drrrrrrrrrill, baby, drrrrrrrrrill

Tina Fey asked the Saturday Night Live writer assigned to the Sarah Palin sketches to script in lots of words with Rs in them. 'She loves those Rs," Fey said. "William Ayerrrrrrrrrs and terrrrrorrrrists - I think she thinks there's oil in those Rs, she's digging deep.' more ...

return of the parrot

John Cleese says, 'I used to think Michael Palin was the funniest Palin on earth.'

But now he says there's a Palin in another parrot sketch.

Cleese says, 'Monty Python could have written this.' more ...

close, not so close

Global warming? 'I believe it's just God hugging us closer'. Tina Fey does Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. The Daily Dish gives us what Sarah Palin says she says about climate change and what she's actually said. more ...

ha

'The green belt is a Labour achievement and we mean to build on it.' (John Lanchester quotes the ex-deputy Prime Minister.) more ...

ha

'So this baby seal walks into a club ... ' (Botz on NIM) more ...

repeating the joke

No Impact Man has asked for some eco-jokes, so I've put up my lightbulb one. I first wrote about why there were no jokes about climate change here and ended the piece with a lightbulb joke I'd just made up. A few months later The Guardian included it in their six best eco-gags (if that doesn't prove the shortage, nothing does). My one went:

Q: How many climate sceptics does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. It's too early to say if the lightbulb needs changing.

This got picked up by Hot Topic and Deltoid and lots of people added their own variations. Here's a pared-down selection of the others:

Q: How many climate sceptics does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None. It's more cost-effective to live in the dark.
A: None. We only know how to screw the planet.
A: None. Changing lightbulbs is for engineers.
A: None. Eventually the lightbulbs will right themselves.
A: First we need more research and we need more research about what that research will be.
A: I can't hear you! I can't hear you! I can't hear you!

Can jokes have an impact? Joe Smith, co-author of Do Good Lives Have To Cost The Earth? says it's important to lighten things up. Cartoonists tackle climate change here. The role of jokes in defeating communism is discussed here. more ...

punch lines

Communism produced joke after joke after joke. And, some say, that helped defeat it. Will the same be true for climate change? more ...