Comedy Comes to Climate Change
After DON't LOOK UP, Producer Staci Roberts-Steele and Director Adam McKay Are Saving the Planet with Short Form Video One Laugh at a Time
There was little comedy in climate change until the movie DONT LOOK UP. Now those madcap probably-a-bit-depressed-but-seriously-angry comic geniuses are back, this time saving the planet on the little screen, X, Instagram and TikTok, everywhere serious scientists are not but probably wish they could be. And know they should be.
The Hollywood umbrella for this noble effort is Yellow Dot Studios, the non-profit spinoff of director Adam McKay’s Hyperobject Industries. McKay was also the director of Vice, the Big Short, Anchorman, and Talladega Nights (not to mention executive producer of Succession) so I’m ready to laugh. Staci Roberts-Steele, co-producer on Don’t Look Up, is managing director of Yellow (as in the sun) Dot and together with a talented crew of LA’s finest they are producing weekly blasts of hilarity that are also as McKay likes to say, “serious as fuck.”
It started with a spoof of those sugary Chevron ads:
“Chevron: It’s hard to comprehend how little of a f— we give about you—” “you meat-puppet who exists only to feed us profits.” (Science teachers need not worry. There is a middle school version with f-bombs stricken.)
STACI ROBERTS-STEELE: “Adam had the idea. He texted me this long voiceover and he said, I feel like this is a funny version of speaking from the oil companies about what they're really trying to do to us, which is murder us. I was like, great, this is hilarious. Can I run with it?
“We put it up online and didn't expect to hear anything more from it. And then, yeah, the next day we had 5 million views.”
Then came “Miss Climate Disaster,” “Gas Nozzle BF,” “Earth’s Toxic Journey” (which features Roberts-Steele in a sequel,) “IRA Kitchen,” and just this week my current favorite, “The Amazing Race 2030.” 2030— not a good year to be running across deserts and climate-destroyed landscapes but the prize is a few gallons of freshwater.
STACI ROBERTS-STEELE: “Gas Nozzle Boyfriend. That was something that we had so many people reach out just because it was a funny sketch on its own, and that one in particular, that's an example of something where we purposefully didn't put like a specific call to action at the end, like go to this website or do this thing because it really was about awareness. Like if someone finds a video funny, they're often going to share it, and if they're going to share it, other people are going to watch it, and people are just going to think about the fact of, isn't it funny that like when you look at an electric car and a gas nozzle, like the gas nozzle is kind of the evil person in this relationship?”
STACI ROBERTS-STEELE: Dealing with the climate crisis and the timeline that we're on, we're trying to speak to a big audience, which is the entire world, because we're all going to be affected by it. Right? We just want to try a lot of different things. Some of the things we've done are more parody commercials at a higher budget. Some things we do are mid-level sketch comedy budgets. Some things we do are quick TikTok explainer videos that we get out that day. We also do a lot of memes and graphics and things like that. Basically we're trying to get out as much stuff as possible, see what's working, what's not, and push in the directions of what is working.”
HOT GLOBE TAKE-HOME: These attack videos are the hard-hitting gut punches the MSM is afraid or unwilling to throw, and they are launched on platforms with an audience of billions not thousands as with most legacy print outlets or even cable television. McKay, Roberts-Steele, Yellow Dot, these are the professionals and their reach is massive. They start with an understanding of everyday apolitical reality, such as abusive relationships, a moment at the gas pump, a Taylor Swift “easter egg,” and then they jiu-jitsu that into a climate meme or message that strikes the funny-bone or the heart.
In a funny-or-die way, Yellow Dot is more of a threat to the oil and gas companies than the IPCC.
Sketch comedy is not edgy to Roberts-Steele and Yellow Dot. That’s breakfast cereal to them. They get up with smiles on their faces. The clip below calling out the hypocrisy of Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability for featuring oil executives and donors, that’s in the face.
STACI ROBERTS-STEELE: The Stamford piece was a little edgier. It is completely accurate that Stanford is taking fossil fuel money to put their sustainability department on and they have had oil executives come speak at the school. The reason we did that is we had some students come to us and they said, we can't believe we're going to this school. We're paying for this school. We're going to the sustainability department. And we're being asked to go watch an oil executive who we know has lied to the public and put out disinformation. They're asking us to go to these seminars with him. There are good people at Stanford, meaning there's a lot of people who have funded that department who are doing good things. But then there's also the fossil fuel companies that are not doing good things. So that one was complicated, definitely edgier.
CRAZY BONUS VIDEO FOR TAYLOR SWIFT CLIMATE-CHANGE FANS!
STACI ROBERTS-STEELE: Everyone's different. We're learning this more and more. Some people are motivated by dark tough situations. Something really bad happens and that motivates them to change. But at least for myself and many of the people that I'm around, the thing that really hits my emotions is humor. If I watch something funny, I'm more likely to think about it the next day.
“If you watch something funny, you have an emotional reaction. There's this period of time after where you use that emotion to do things in life or to make changes. That's how I work. Adam is the same way. He definitely gets out of bed because of things that make him laugh. That's where we come from. The people that relate to that, they seem to like this.”
STACI ROBERTS-STEELE: But the bigger layer [in Hollywood] that'll have much more of an impact, I think, [even then climate videos and movies] has been just seeing the behavior of people making climate-based choices in their lives on shows. So, for example, if we see the lead of a TV show walking out to their car and before they get in, they unplugged their car or like seeing a wide shot on a TV show with a bird's eye view of solar panels on most of the roofs or people eating dinner, and they're not even mentioning that they're eating a plant-based meal or like a storyline about the teenage daughter who's going to protest her school because they are using plastic bottles, whatever it is.
“It’s an interesting shift. I feel like shows when I was growing up made made fun of Greenpeace people or made fun of people trying to save the planet. And now we're saying those types of people are the ones that are actually the people we need to save the planet!”
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HOT GLOBE’s Steve Chapple (l.) at the Writer’s Guild Awards ceremony with Adam McKay (r.) before the recent strike.
(This column was produced with the help of Hot Globe Assoc. Editor Michael Janelle.)
BELOW IS THE AUDIO OF THE FULL INTERVIEW IN WHICH ROBERTS-STEELE TALKS ABOUT HOW BEING A MOM OF A 6-YEAR-OLD, AND ALSO HOW BEING NEW TO THE CLIMATE REALITY HAVE HELPED HER SEE THE SITUATION WITH FRESH EYES:
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