Archive for the ‘Humor: Planet Plus Funny.’ Category

A Silver Sheen to . . . well, you know.

Saturday, June 19th, 2010

Yes. So.

Garbage didn’t work. Natural fibers were rejected. Booming school has apparently been a failure. In the meantime, an ever-increasing parade of oil-soaked birds and the collapse of local industries.
What else can we do but laugh?

If there is a silver lining or sheen or gloss or whatever to the gulf spill, it’s that the insanely large catastrophe has spawned some of the best ecological humor in recent years.

Don’t EVEN try to take that the wrong way.

Pro comedy players like UCB Theater, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report have been defending ecosystems and decrying BP with their sharp and witty tools of trade. Most memorably, The Onion suggests a Massive Flow of Bullshit from BP Headquarters will drown us all.

It’s times like these that laughter literally heals. Which is not to say: it scrubs oily birds. Rather: it keeps ecological massacres such as these from driving you insane.

The Planet Gets Funnier.

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Hooray for making planet-saving funnier. The American University just closed an Eco-Comedy Contest together with the Environmental Film Festival. Bless them for hunting down the funny in this sea of green seriousness. They received over 70 entries, and while the finalists included hardcore bikers, suggestive trash and some lewd vegetarian lyrics, the judges finally went with Green My House by Neeru Productions in Ireland (nobody likes sarcastic redheads).

Green My House is a look at some of the incredibly baller ways you can pimp your house green. Have you ever, for instance, tried the ever-sexy “swapping out your light bulbs”? Okay, so maybe we’re not ready to start a green SNL (or Whitest Kids, or The State, or Big Gay Sketch Show, or some other sketch comedy show you think is funny), but at least we’re moving past Artic Circle. Into creative endeavors that are actually amusing.

grist.org, for instance, has finally decided to let professional comedians, like Eugene Mirman and Aziz Ansari, donate some funny to their cause. Thank you, grist– you were killing us. Other semi-hopeful glimpses of a Sustainably Funny Future include the chuckle-inducing Green Shaman, or the “funny ’cause it’s true” work from Annie Leonard. She just finished a new video, the Story of Bottled Water, that will have you tearing up. With laughter. Okay, so maybe it will be the laughter of a deep and tortured pain. But funny is funny . . . right?

The Story of Cap and Trade

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Free Range Studios recently released the sequel to their viral Story of Stuff video: The Story of Cap and Trade. Just in time for COP15. The premise is that the details of cap and trade need to be examined to ensure they don’t preserve (polluting, exploitative) business as usual.

This is especially timely given the first-day fracas of the climate talks thus far, including a series of emails “covering up” information refuting climate change– now termed ClimateGate– and a leaked “Danish text” which positions solutions in drastic favor of first-world, industrial, polluting countries.With this new video,  Annie Leonard again tackles an emotional, important and complicated subject with straight talk and humor.

Planet Plus Funny: Auto Tune the News.

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

If you thought Melissa Etheridge was heart-wrenching in An Inconvenient Truth, wait until you hear Katie Couric sing.

Seriously: Auto-Tune the right clip of  Couric, and you’ve got a new song of earth-savery. Or so prove the antics of Auto Tune the News.

Auto-Tune is that glorious software that makes Britney spears sound like a robot Ella Fitzgerald. It uses a phase vocoder to make singers sound more on-key (and futuristic) than they actually are.

The brilliance of Auto Tune the News is applying the technology to news anchors and their stories. It could be a simple prank illustrating how easy it is to sound like a pop star, but the editing of the “songs” actually illustrates how intertwined and interdependent the issues are, from climate change to race to drug regulation. All of the issues blur together in a hilarious top-40 tune.

For a different kind of hilarious reality check,  watch the Keep it Green Girls ride the bus. They do tamer things on Planet Green, but if you ever hunger for some green-meets-concrete, here ya go.

Planet Plus Funny.

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

I’d like to take an opportunity to salute some minor heroes of the eco-art movement. These are people who aren’t neccessarily attending conferences or participating in exhibitions. They might not even consider themselves eco-artists: they aren’t taking it too seriously. I’m talking about funny folks.

Anyone who has seen Rivers and Tides or any of Andy Goldswothy’s work will appreciate the journey of the Trash Artist, above. Equally worthy contributions to the field include Casual Mafia’s In My Prius, and an in-depth report on the current ToFLU epidemic.

Thank you for taking the time to use your skills to make fun of us: any movement that can’t engage in a little healthy self-mockery is probably doomed to fail.