Chapter Nine | Harnessing humor for tough talks: humanitarian experiences addressing exclusion and climate risks | Pablo Suarez

Harnessing humor for tough talks: humanitarian experiences addressing exclusion and climate risks

Pablo Suarez

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PROJECT SUMMARY

Humor, like humanitarian work, is about the clash between what is and what could be. In the shared experience of humor, people dissolve their defenses. Laughter emerges when we recognize reality as ridiculous, unacceptable, needing change. Then, after humor, we can talk candidly about what’s going on, and what to do. In the context of environmental politics and justice shaping people’s risks, we have found that the careful design and deployment of humor can support learning and dialogue on difficult topics. Building on experiences with diverse stakeholders, this chapter shares two practical, successful approaches to harnessing the power of humor: cartoonathons (events where participants join forces with professional humorists to co-create cartoons as a way to engage in difficult, complex conversations), and weaving threads (cartoon-infused interactions, in person or on print, aimed at exploring unity in diversity).

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

This chapter offers a set of innovative, humor-based approaches aimed at fostering creativity, connectedness and candor when confronting complex issues. While many of the experiences build on climate risk management endeavors, the proposed approaches incorporate a range of themes, from urban waste management to anti-racism. They can be tailored to a variety of issues pertaining to environmental policy and justice.

SUGGESTED BACKGROUND READING

• Popovic, S., & Miller, M. (2015). Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World. Random House.
• Green, D., & Suarez, P. (2022, July 26). Humanitarian insights from the latest IPCC report – via cartoons and cardboard theater. From Poverty to Power. https://frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/humanitarian-insights-from-the -latest-ipcc-report-via-cartoons-and-cardboard-theater/.
• Mankoff, B. (2014). How About Never—Is Never Good for You? My Life in Cartoons. Henry Holt and Company.

MULTIMEDIA BACKGROUND MATERIALS

• TEDx Talks (2019, July 16). Harnessing humor for humanitarian work | Pablo Suarez | TEDxModena [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=NuEZ0Gziq8o.
• Cartoonathons (n.d.). Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. https://www .climatecentre.org/priority_areas/innovation/innovation_tools/humour-2/ cartoonathons/.
• Climate Centre (2022, July 25). Timely Adaptation [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/639044449.
• CartoonStock (n.d.). Cartoon Humor, Political Cartoons, Comics, Illustrations. Cartoon Collections. https://www.cartoonstock.com.

ISSUE BACKGROUND: WHY HUMOR FOR INCLUSIVE CLIMATE RESILIENCE

The last few years have made it abundantly clear that things can go wrong, and that many things can go wrong at the same time. Changing climate risks are becoming increasingly threatening, in a context of many additional threats ranging from global pandemics to volatile economies to pervasive conflict – whether via military action across national borders, or resulting from racist violence in cities of the Global North. In that context, how can humanitarians, government authorities, experts, donors, vulnerable communities and many other stakeholders join forces to anticipate and alleviate human suffering? Fun can be FUNctional to support serious learning and dialogue on changing risks – particularly when there are power asymmetries that shape how people and organizations relate to each other as they convene to understand and address what can go wrong. Unfortunately, workshops, conferences, and other events allegedly designed for bringing stakeholders together tend to be completely humorless: seriousness devoid of fun can put people to sleep. Think about your own experience, likely starting from your student years in the classroom: a sequence of formal unidirectional statements followed by insufficient Q&A and small-group discussions that typically fail to create the impetus needed to confront the vast problems posed by our changing world. How many calls for action coming from a serious podium have moved you to action?

This approach is safe for presenters and organizers, but does it make enough of a difference? We are delivering our messages, again and again, often fruitlessly. We need new approaches to help turn learning and dialogue into concrete action.

As a researcher on climate and disasters turned humanitarian worker, I have witnessed an unacceptable yet accepted pattern: we don’t really know how to engage others in difficult conversations. From the classroom to global negotiations on climate change, learning and dialogue processes are dominated by predictably dry interactions that too often fail to engender candor, creativity, and connectedness. This is particularly true in my field of work: changing climate risks require a diverse range of stakeholders to constantly learn, reassess, explore potential decisions and their consequences, and figure out ways to mobilize people and resources – whether because a hurricane is expected to hit your district in a few days – or because sea level rise will render your island unsafe for human habitation in a few decades – or because the pervasive threat of more extreme temperatures requires you, your team and your nation to develop heatwave risk management plans.

There is one key theme underlying the climate risks that are reshaping humanitarian work that really needs more candor, creativity, and connectedness. It is also a difficult topic to bring up fruitfully: the social construction of vulnerability. Marginalization leads to unequal impacts, often as a result of individual and organizational prejudices, conscious and unconscious biases, and many other mechanisms of differentiation that perpetuate systemic patterns of exclusion – and its counterpart: privilege.

Differential impacts of climate-related shocks and trends can be observed with regard to gender, ethnicity, age, class, religion, sexual orientation, and a range of interconnected social and political identities. While much scholarly work points to the irrefutable evidence of such differential impacts, the truth of the matter is that those with the resources and power rarely want to let go of their privilege and enable the most vulnerable to make decisions that matter. Many lofty ideals are invoked in formal documents and statements, but it is not easy to initiate a candid conversation about what is unacceptable yet accepted. Sensitivities are enhanced; defenses go up; emotions can flare. How to bridge the gap between what is and what could be? How to help people confront a painful reality, see from someone else’s perspective, and begin the necessary process of transformation?

PROJECT INSTRUCTIONS

This chapter shares two novel approaches to meaningful interaction mediated by humor: “cartoonathons” (participatory co-creation of visual humor for learning and dialogue) and “weaving threads” (humor-based interactions, in person or in print, aimed at exploring unity in diversity).

Cartoonathon

A “cartoonathon” is a participatory process that engages participants in co-creating humor-infused tools to support learning, dialogue, and action. Cartoonathons can be set up around any theme involving tensions, contradictions, absurdities and dangers. Here we will focus on workshops, conferences and other events designed to explore matters involving climate risks, exclusion, and differential vulnerability.

This work has typically been outside the conventional classroom context, yet our serious-but-fun engagements are suitable for academic endeavors because much of what needs to happen is learning and teaching, as well as listening and co-creating.

Our cartoon-infused activities have successfully contributed to over 100 events, convened by diverse entities (from municipal governments to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)), and covering a wide range of themes (from “early warning systems” to “anti-racism”). All the cartoons featured in this chapter were co-created during our cartoonathon events.

While the cartoonathon approach can be designed and facilitated following different sequences to accommodate specific needs, opportunities and constraints, they typically involve the following components.

1. Warm-up: cartoon annotation

We begin with an unconventional activity: after a brief welcome, participants are invited to review about a dozen thought-provoking cartoons, curated to inspire rich discussions about the event’s theme. For virtual events we use a tailor-designed digital platform: the “Cartoon Gallery”, which allows online participants to view and annotate the image files (individually or in small breakout-group teams), then view what others annotated and have conversations based on a tailor-made prompt. For face-to-face events, this activity can be held simply with cartoons printed in poster size and placed against the wall, or smaller prints distributed among groups of two to six participants.

An interesting example of the annotation activity emerged during a cartoonathon held in early 2020 in the context of a workshop on crises, insurance, and risk. A cartoon by Drew Dernavich showed an ocean of cars in a traffic jam, with one passenger telling the driver: “Try Honking Again” – surrounded by annotations added by participants, including the Deputy Minister of Finance of a participating country. One of the annotations said: “Let’s create another project/program like the one we created years ago and which also failed.”

Such a level of candor in the presence of a senior government official illustrates a key fact: humor engenders trust – and change happens at the speed of trust.

2. Substance, with a humorist’s lens

The cartoon annotation activity is followed by “serious” presentations, group discussions, and other conventional approaches. Meanwhile, via live stream, two to six cartoon artists attentively listen to the content being shared as well as to reactions and other manifestations of the participants’ experience, all while sketching original drawings and captions in real time. They don’t aim to synthesize the presentations: instead, their cartoons challenge what was said and its implications. More than aiming to provoke laughter, the visual creations seek to inspire critical reflection and meaningful dialogue (though of course humor is welcome).

For example, in the context of the event mentioned above, a government official requested support to “bring the government to the field, where disasters happen.” Participants nodded in acceptance, and that statement was listed as one of the key proposals for concrete next steps among the organizations participating in the event. Yet one of the cartoon artists detected – and depicted – some questionable underlying assumptions … What are the chances of such a proposal actually working?

3. Share draft cartoons and engage participants

After a short period with other event activities, such as talks or coffee breaks, the professional humorists polish the sketches into advanced drafts; and then submit their selected drafts, and the event facilitator shares those cartoons with participants (on paper or using the “Cartoon Gallery” tool mentioned above), inviting enjoyment, scrutiny, and feedback.

The facilitator invites the audience to form small groups and to

• Briefly discuss how the selected cartoons connect to their own experiences, questions, emotions, and insights.

• Suggest improvements to any of the cartoon drafts. Feedback submitted digitally can be integrated by cartoonists (if they so wish) into a polished version of the drawings and captions, hours or days after the session.
• Propose ways to integrate the emerging cartoons into future “serious” endeavors, such as publications, trainings, awareness-raising or advocacy campaigns, facilitated discussions, and more.

In the cartoonathon example mentioned above, participants critically examined the various cartoon drafts and suggested ways to make them clearer, better, or more useful. Of course, when event participants saw the “bring government to the field” image, at first they were a bit confused (“Huh?”); then something “clicked” and triggered responses from gentle smiles to outbursts of loud laughter (“Ha-ha”); and then they experienced a sudden jolt of understanding (“Aha!”); this cartoon was focusing on what was left unsaid about the challenges of bringing government to the field – what government presence, exactly? A scientist to map out hazard-prone areas? A community organizer to support a land use planning and zoning effort for risk management? An agent of the security forces to enforce evacuation orders next time there’s a flood warning? An accountant to ensure appropriate use of funds for disaster prevention? Something else? All of the above?

The final version below integrates suggestions shared by participants, such as making the mountains more rugged, or depicting failed crops around the bureaucrat’s desk, to represent a field in times of crisis. Needless to say, this cartoon was celebrated and embraced by event participants and organizers.

Importantly, not only did the cartoon serve to enrich the formal conversations about how to design and fund the proposed increase of government presence in the field, but the cartoon-infused process served to engender a very different dynamic, energizing the interaction, inspiring people and organizations to dive deeply into the complexities that lie beneath the surface, surfacing the courage to honestly confront what can go wrong, and inviting a new sense of bonding and trust that can have lasting effects well beyond the event.

4. Publish final cartoons

Improved versions of selected cartoons are shared with event participants and, if so desired, integrated into the event report and/or organizers’ website, future presentations, etc., acknowledging the co-creation process. Cartoonists retain creative ownership and license, while allowing for cartoons to be used by event organizers under an appropriate license agreement.

These innovative “cartoonathon” events have been delivered in both face-to-face and fully virtual modalities, for organizations as diverse as the German government, the World Bank, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Green Climate Fund, Harvard University, the BMW Foundation, the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations. Cartoons created through this participatory process have been featured in globally recognized news (e.g., the Washington Post on heatwave risks and Vice Media on climate and conflict).

In our experience, this designed use of serious cartoons helps participants and organizers to confront denial and reimagine what is possible. In the shared experience of humor, people dissolve their defenses. Laughter emerges when we recognize reality as ridiculous, unacceptable, needing change. Then, after humor, we can talk candidly about what’s going on, and what to do. Humor isn’t merely entertainment: it is smart, strategic communication.

“Weaving Threads”: Seeking Unity in Diversity

Endeavors that compile contributions from multiple voices spanning diverse disciplines tend to offer valuable content with a desirable range of perspectives. This is true of most conferences and courses that bring together various academic fields – and is inevitably the case for complex endeavors such as this book on teaching environmental policy and justice. Imagine you aim to bring together contributions on themes as disparate as technology and Indigenous knowledge, urban planning and music, disaster response and humor: how to create genuinely original sparks of new thoughts out of the collision of ideas and perspectives? How to explore interactions, complementarities, tensions, and opportunities for mutual enrichment, beyond the usual opening and closing portions offered by conveners? The likely default is that the various elements come across as interesting but self-sufficient, insufficiently woven into a cohesive whole. Can humor help seek and create unity in diversity?

Weaving threads is a creative way to enable meaningful interplay across content, including playful-but-serious dialogue between different voices – whether contributors to an edited volume, panelists in an academic session, or activists in a group project. It builds on the “cartoon annotation” activity described above, but adds a tailor-designed relational component aimed at highlighting connections and disconnects.

In essence: given a set of diverse key points brought to the convened endeavor by multiple contributors, the following three steps are followed:

1. First, one cartoon is chosen per contributor, selected to capture an essential core of the issue as seen from the contributor’s perspective.
2. Then each contributor is invited to bring their own “lens” to view, reflect on, question, and complement one or more of the other cartoons – either conversationally during face-to-face events, or in a digitally mediated form in the case of publications. Such cross-theme exchanges constitute threads that weave together the diverse perspectives, forming a tapestry that can show tensions, harmonies, holes, anchor points, and more.
3. The resulting “woven threads” embodied in the annotated cartoons are shared with other stakeholders (e.g., participants in face-to-face events, or readers of an edited volume).

This cartoon-infused weaving of threads has been used multiple times, in different versions, chiefly in high-level virtual sessions during the pandemic. Examples include the Climate: RED global conference convened by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies; and the Cities on the Frontline webinar series co-convened by the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, and partners.

In Table 9.1 I offer a taste of the weaving threads approach using this edited volume as a case study. I propose a selection of cartoons, which might relate to some of the other chapters, noting in the right-hand column how an instructor might encourage students to annotate the cartoons. You will also find a few cartoons peppered throughout this book that were selected by chapter authors themselves to highlight a key learning outcome of their project or reflection.

When brought into the classroom, these cartoons can be made into an interactive experience online. Please use the QR code below to visit this website (https://bit.ly/TeachingEnv-Humor) to see what this might look like in practice (and to leave your own annotations!).

ADDRESSING COMMON CHALLENGES

Like any powerful approach, humor can lead to desired or undesired outcomes, depending on the user’s intent, experience, and sense of responsibility. Drew Tarvin sums it up in his book, Humor that Works:

“Humor is like a screwdriver: an incredibly effective tool that often involves a twist and, when used in the right context, can help you construct and deconstruct any number of objects. But, in order to get the benefits, you have to use it correctly” (Tarvin, 2019). Indeed, it could lead to severely negative consequences if used irresponsibly or incompetently. Before you jump, you must assess the risks, and be prepared for what may await.

In our experience, there are four main ways to address common challenges that may emerge when using humor for serious endeavors.

1. Focus on your audience’s needs and opportunities

As described above, the goal of using humor is not to cause laughter, but to be more effective at getting from where we are to where we need to be. Like all good communication and engagement activities, make sure you structure humor infusions with the audience in mind. While humor is universal, humor is also highly cultural. With the help of a professional humorist and appropriate consultations with key stakeholders, tailor your offerings based on what is culturally appropriate, relevant, and resonant. Make sure that the humor infusions contribute “Aha!” moments and not moments where people walk away feeling thoroughly offended.

2. Don’t force it

Humor is not right for every situation. There is a time and a place for humor. Be critical about whether the humor would advance and add to your endeavor’s goal, such as risk communication or environmental justice engagement.

Don’t think it will always work.

3. Humor must be designed and employed smartly

Remember: a joke is a statement intended to provoke laughter; and if people sense you’re embarking on a provocation, they’ll be ruthlessly intolerant if you are perceived as going too far (i.e., offensive), or not far enough (i.e., fall flat). From that perspective, the activities we propose in this chapter are relatively safe because they’re aimed not at provoking laughter but at engendering learning and dialogue. Nonetheless: be smart, be cautious, and be caringly responsible if something doesn’t work as intended.

4. Aim for bonding about what’s laughable

Don’t target people; target what’s absurd about us and the ridiculous, improvable systems we inhabit. Ensure empathy. Remember that somehow, somewhen, someone can change the rules of play – and maybe you can play a role.

When thinking of “humor,” most people think of words like laughter, fun, comedy, or jokes. But professional humorists, when thinking about humor, think of words like conflict, risk, ambiguity, contradiction, incongruity, danger… These words are central to environmental politics and justice – and they also describe most accurately what humor can awaken in participatory processes that are not managed appropriately. The good news is: you can design and facilitate the use of humor for serious endeavors in ways that feel “trespass-while-safe.” There is abundant, analytically rigorous evidence that well-crafted humor can improve communication, engender trust and bonding, enhance problem solving, and enable difficult conversations.

Martin Luther King said that we need creative laughter amid difficulties and tension. When appropriate, try humor: First create a focus on what seems strange, out of place, wrong.

Help others to find the system funny … Huh? If it’s well crafted, humor emerges: Ha-ha! Which then can create the breakthrough. Aha!

REFERENCE

Tarvin, A. (2019). Humor that Works: The Missing Skill for Success and Happiness at Work. Page Two Books.