Stuart Goldsmith: I'm a climate comedian but I don't bang people over the head with it

“Part of the skill of being a good climate communicator, I think, is not to bang people over the head with climate,” he says. “I don’t think I am going to switch my Instagram handle and website and all the rest of it. There’s no point getting the headed notepaper that says I’m a climate comedian because literally part of the skill is to sort of stealth the messages into popular culture."

The 49-year-old comedian is currently on tour with his second sustainability stand-up show, Canary, which he is bringing to Sheffield this week. In the show, which takes its name from the idea of a canary in a coal mine acting as a warning for impending disaster, he confronts his climate dread head-on and explores how to turn fear into something useful.

Whether it’s doing donuts in a secondhand EV, drinking from a reusable bottle on an aeroplane, or taking a long-haul flight to tell jokes at a climate conference, Stuart also interrogates whether individual lifestyle changes add up to a solution, or “play into the hands of the fossil fuel companies”.

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Stuart, whose previous climate comedy show Spoilers won the Best Show award at the 2023 Leicester Comedy Festival, made his first attempt at a climate joke five years ago. But it wasn’t a particularly conscious decision.

“What you’re thinking about comes out in your comedy,” he reflects. “I found that I had a lot of climate dread. Unless you’re living under a rock, you can’t help but notice that something really important is happening right now. And I think it’s very easy not to think about it and not to talk about it.

"I was having a lot of private dread and not many conversations. It’s a complicated topic, it’s apparently a long way off - only less so now, and it implicates us all….It’s very hard to say, for example, I’m not very happy about how much carbon we are putting in the air if you just went on an aeroplane on holiday.

“It just kept bubbling out in my work did my fear, my climate anxiety. And it happened at a time when I was feeling a bit frustrated with stand-up comedy. I’d ticked off all the career boxes that I wanted to…It was starting to feel a bit like a circuit…a bit like going around in a circle and part of why I got into this job was that it was going to be different everyday.

“So that happened at the same time as I started talking about the climate and the challenge of making ocean acidification funny, or scary complicated things funny, and it totally rekindled my excitement about stand-up as well as helping me to process my climate dread because suddenly I had a focus for that. It’s much easier to read scary information if a part of your brain is going ‘is there something funny in that?’”

Stuart began his tour with Canary after the show’s run at Edinburgh Fringe this summer. It was his 32nd appearance at the festival, having started out there as a street performer when he was just 17.

“I learnt the secret of how to walk on broken glass when I was a teenager,” says Stuart. “I saw someone do it and I worked it out and me and my mate went and tried it and we got it right. We thought let’s go and do a street show in Stratford near where we lived at the time, let’s see if we can make some money and we did. We thought right we need never get real jobs – and I never did.”

He was a street performer for many years and used the money he made on tickets to watch stand-up comedy. Already in the entertainment industry, it was somewhat inevitable that he’d then give it a go himself. He made the shift two decades ago.

“You can imagine how hard it is to be a comedian,” he reflects. “You have to go out and fail over and over again for no money, drive to the ends of the earth in the middle of the night. That’s very hard to do when you have a regular job - I was very lucky because I didn’t have a regular job. I’d be at Covent Garden at the weekend, that was my job. So I could do shows, make enough money to pay the rent and that let me work for free doing stand-up.”

These days, he specialises in the climate crisis, his comedy having featured across media and television outlets. Stuart also hosts the Comedian’s Comedian podcast, interviewing many of the comedy world’s household names and performs at eco festivals and corporate sustainability events, using comedy to tackle a serious subject. There’s a huge appetite for it, he says, given more than 80 per cent of the world's population wants more action on climate change.

"I’m acting as a sort of pressure valve. I’m giving people permission to laugh at something scary, agency to start conversations about something they maybe didn’t want to start before,” Stuart says. "If I can talk about that in a way that’s funny and helps people in the audience have conversations about it, then brilliant.”

As for his own views? “As much as I would love a climate Jesus to be Prime Minister and say no more fossil fuels, we’re grounding all the planes tomorrow, I’m a bit more pragmatic than that,” he notes. But “we’ve seen how volatile and unstable the fossil fuel industry is,” he continues. “We’ve got to move from digging things out of the ground and burning them which is crazy, to tapping into sources that are constant and perpetual and free and everyone’s realising that now.”

- Stuart Goldsmith is at Foundry, Sheffield with Canary on November 6. For tickets, visit www.stuartgoldsmith.com/comedy