On a recent evening in Waldoboro, comedian Forrest Shaw is alone on stage at the Waldo Theater, doing a stand-up routine that he’s been developing for the past year or so.
"I would love to have an electric car. I can't afford one. I DM'd Elon Musk to ask him if he'd give me a Cybertruck. He got back to me. He asked me if I knew anywhere to get ketamine," he joked. "So, we have started the conversation. We're on our way.”
The classic advice for a budding comedian is "write what you know." And for Shaw, that would be science. While he's been in the comedy biz for 15 years now, he's only recently tapped into his climate background for material.
“I was a marine biologist for almost a decade and a half, and I saw firsthand how difficult it was to get people to be emotionally connected to subjects like habitat destruction or climate change or plastic pollution, things like that," he said. "So I wrote this show."
Peppered throughout the show are trivia questions for the audience and each winner gets a prize:
“Branded Swedish fish in an individual single-use plastic. Got a very good deal from a company in China, advertises having very low lead levels. So, I was pretty excited about that.”
“Unfortunately, on the way over, the shipping container fell into the Pacific.”
The show titled, "The Ocean Hates You," walks a fine line. Shaw said the goal is to help the audience face the enormity of the crisis but come away feeling a little less anxious.
“You know, people get discouraged. They feel overwhelmed, and they kind of just check out,” he said. “So I wanted to find a way to talk about these subjects that was engaging and not exhausting.”
Climate comedy isn’t a new idea. Over the last decade, training courses and programs have popped up for comedians and writers to incorporate climate themes or content into their work.
Among them is "Sustainable Standup," a program for people with no comedy background at all, who work in climate non-profits, or as advocates or therapists, and are trying to communicate more effectively about the crisis.
“Not in a way like, 'Oh, you'll feel better' or like it'll solve your feelings, but, how do we reframe these scary things in these scary times and touch them with loving humor? And I was intrigued."
Emily Strasser, a professor of writing and English at Tufts University, co-teaches a class called "Writing the Climate Crisis."
Strasser was brand new to stand up. She said at first, writing jokes about climate change made her even angrier. But she discovered something more.
“Over the course of those weeks, I was surprised that I started to come up with jokes, you know, that were cracking me up at least," she said.
Strasser said the process of trying to write jokes about these weighty issues was almost like changing a camera's focus: the overall picture wasn't any different.
"But there was also part of my brain that was like, ‘What's the joke here? You know. What's the angle on this that is humorous or could be humorous?’ And it did bring me a bit of buoyancy,” she said.
Shaw said there was a point where he felt the planet was doomed. He was surprised to find that writing and performing this show has changed his mind.
“It's crazy to think that in making this show that I thought would be depressing, I would have more hope in making it," he said. "So I'm excited to tell people that."
It's hard to say how the audience felt as they filed out of the Waldo Theater, but there were smiles and laughs all around.
