Coffee & Geography Season 6 Episode 18
I compared Stuart Goldsmith to Johnny Bravo within the first minute of our conversation. This was because of the hair, and partly because I’m going through a phase of revisiting cartoons from my childhood. Stuart appeared pleased with the comparison, particularly because the alternatives people usually offer are Jeremy Vine and Richard Hammond.
I then decided Anson Mount’s Captain Christopher Pike might be more suitable, because I am incapable of recording too many podcast episodes without bringing Star Trek into them. The point is that Stuart has excellent climate-comedian hair.
There was a second reason the conversation began with his appearance rather than atmospheric carbon dioxide, social inequality or ecological collapse. Humour changes the conditions in which serious conversations happen. A shared joke establishes that neither person is about to deliver a lecture, even if the discussion eventually moves into subjects that could justify one.
Stuart has worked as a stand-up comedian for more than 20 years. During the last few years, climate change has become the central focus of his writing and performance. His first climate show, Spoilers, won Best Show at the 2023 Leicester Comedy Festival. His second, Canary, is touring the UK during autumn 2026 and will finish with a filmed performance at Bristol Old Vic on 18 November.
Moving back to Bristol
Stuart was born in Chipping Sodbury, moved away from the Bristol area when he was six and grew up in Leamington Spa. He later lived in London, became attached to life in East Dulwich, and assumed he would remain there. Then he met somebody at Glastonbury Festival and moved to Bristol for love.
This meant returning to a place where he had been born but had few memories of living. He is technically from Bristol and therefore believes he has acquired the right to home-brewed banter, while people who arrived later remain “blow-ins”.
We spent some time discussing whether the right to ‘native banter’ weakens with every year spent living somewhere else. I was born in Essex but have lived in Norfolk for longer, so my own licence to make Essex jokes may be on borrowed time if it hasn’t gone already!
Stuart also described losing his “city walk skill” after leaving London. The body learns how to move through a city: which signs can be ignored, how to position yourself on public transport, how quickly to walk and where to stand; ‘skills’ that can fade when no longer used. I still seem to possess the ability to remain upright on the Tube while other people – most likely tourists – fall over.
None of this of course was the main subject of the episode, it was your typical podcast intro small talk. But it did help establish that people become capable of navigating particular environments through repeated experience. Climate comms has its own environments, codes and expected ways of behaving. Stuart entered that space with skills developed somewhere else and began testing whether stand-up could help people navigate it differently.
Finding a climate side hustle
One of the ideas that helped Stuart define the direction of his work came from Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. Her Climate Action Venn Diagram asks three questions:
- What work needs doing?
- What are you good at?
- What brings you joy or satisfaction?
The centre, where those circles overlap, is the place to concentrate your climate action. Johnson argues that this is more useful than allowing concern about individual carbon footprints to consume all our attention. The climate crisis requires transformation across energy, agriculture, transport, industry, buildings, ecosystems, policy, culture and the economy, so there are many forms of useful work and many ways people can contribute.
Stuart described the overlap as a “climate side hustle”. For Stuart, the work that needed doing was climate communication. The skill was making people laugh. The source of satisfaction was stand-up itself. Because Stuart was already an established comedian, the side hustle could become the main work.
The Venn diagram proves very useful because climate action is often presented through a small number of visible roles. Scientist. Activist. Campaigner. Policy expert. Renewable-energy engineer. And while of course they are important, they can’t describe the full range of work, roles or expertise needed. So a comedian can doing a different part of the climate communication work.
When climate dread becomes material
Before Stuart found the neatness of the climate-action Venn diagram, the process began with dread.
Climate catastrophe, global heating, extreme weather and ecological breakdown became increasingly difficult for him to ignore. Stuart described himself as hypervigilant and prone to anxiety, so reading more did not produce a calm sense of informed preparedness. It intensified the fear.
He began talking about climate change on stage because that was what he knew how to do. The attempt to make the subject funny helped him process some of the anxiety, but it also renewed his interest in stand-up after two decades of doing it. Climate change presented a difficult creative problem. The material had to acknowledge the seriousness of the evidence while still producing a room in which laughter was possible.
Somebody once described Stuart as a prism: complicated or boring material enters, then comes out refracted into something colourful and engaging. That’s a really appealing way to visualise it – that the material has been morphed into a form in which people can see different parts of it.
I spend much of my professional life communicating climate science and helping educators turn evidence into something usable in schools. Also, working within the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, surrounded by people producing and contributing to some of that evidence, I know how serious the situation is. I also know that communicating only through seriousness can leave people shut down, defensive or exhausted.
There have been times when I’ve felt guilty about using humour. Climate change is already harming people, destabilising ecosystems and disrupting education. Framing an aspect of that crisis through a joke can initially feel disrespectful.
The response from educators and audiences has usually taught me the opposite. A well-judged joke does not necessarily make the subject less serious. It can give people an emotional hook to stay with it.
Where the line sits
Stuart says he i scontinually testing that boundary. The second half of his current live show changes from a polished performance into what he calls playtime. Audience members can write questions during the interval, and Stuart tests new material from notes and index cards. Ideas that don’t work immediately may be revisited over several years until he finds the right angle.
Some subjects resist humour because any obvious joke would target the people already being harmed. Stuart used the example of coltan in mobile phones. Coltan mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been associated with dangerous and exploitative working conditions, including child labour. The issue implicates anybody carrying a device containing components linked to those supply chains.
So a direct accusation is likely to trigger defensiveness in an audiance because they will feel judged, and then possibility begin looking for flaws in the messenger as a reason to dismiss the message. Stuart’s approach is to implicate himself first and then create an obviously playful fiction in which the problem belongs to everybody else’s phones, certainly not the phones held by anybody in the room.
Nobody genuinely believes they have been exempted. The joke briefly removes the threat of personal accusation, which allows the uncomfortable information to enter.
Stuart initially described comedy as mayonnaise helping a burger go down, immediately regretted the comparison, and replaced it with comedy as a social and storytelling lubricant. I liked both analogies!
A safer place to discuss difficult things
Children and adults are already thinking about climate change. Education staff carry anxiety too, sometimes while feeling they lack the time, confidence or permission to discuss it. Avoiding the subject doesn’t create safety. It can leave people alone with fears that are being fed by news alerts and social-media algorithms.
A safer learning environment also doesn’t mean pretending the evidence is reassuring. It means, and has always truly meant, creating conditions in which people can ask questions, admit uncertainty, explore responsibility and remain part of the conversation.
Humour can help establish those conditions, but it is dependent on audience and context. A joke that creates solidarity in one group may alienate another. Humour can challenge hierarchy, expose contradiction and provide relief, but can also reinforce prejudice or direct laughter towards people with less power.
Jennifer Simpson describes humour as capable of functioning as an attention hook, reflective mirror, political counter-narrative, explainer, tool of empowerment and form of comic relief. Her work also stresses its potential within education to provoke critical engagement with difficult subjects such as climate change and inequality.
I met Jennifer at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference this year and was in the session where she talked about this work. It gave language to something I had already experienced in schools and professional development. Humour does several different jobs, and an educator who creates a safe learning environment knows which job is needed and who’s carrying the risk if the joke fails.
Climate memes and safeguarding
I showed Stuart several of the climate-safeguarding memes I have created.
The first used the Simpsons “don’t make me tap the sign” format, with the sign reading:
Climate change is a child safeguarding issue.
Others used Boromir, the two-button dilemma and the balloon format to make the same argument: statutory safeguarding guidance needs to acknowledge climate-related hazards and disruption.
Describing each of images for audio listeners produced Stuart’s suggestion for a recurring segment called Memes for the Blind!
So this was my attempt to use a recognised format (memes) to communicate underlying work that is serious. Excessive heat, flooding, wildfire smoke, storms, displacement, food insecurity and infrastructure disruption is directly affect children’s safety, health, attendance and continuity of education. If safeguarding policy ignores those conditions, settings are being asked to prepare for children’s lives without fully acknowledging the context in which those lives are unfolding.
The meme creates a small moment of recognition. Somebody laughs because the format is familiar, then has to process the message placed inside it. A policy paper can provide evidence and detail. The meme can make somebody stop scrolling.
We need both.
Badgers, beavers and street wolves
Away from the stage, Stuart has found himself noticing nature more than he used to.
He does not describe himself as a ‘twitcher’, but birds now attract his attention. On the way home from a friend’s birthday, he encountered a badger a few streets from his home in south Bristol and was delighted. Somebody had reportedly seen a beaver in Bristol’s New Cut, while deer travel through green corridors connected with Arnos Vale Cemetery.
From there we developed the proposal that every street should have a wolf. Street wolves would require careful risk assessment, so I’d have to do a bit of research before recommending them for school Climate Action Plans!
With regards to the beaver, I was delighted to hear about that. It’s a good sign that some were spotted in the New Cut. Stuart knew that beavers build dams but wanted to understand why this helps wider ecosystems.
Beaver activity can store water, slow flows and create a more varied mosaic of wetlands, pools and channels. Their engineering provides habitats used by other species and can increase the resilience of catchments, although outcomes depend on location and require appropriate management.
I attempted to explain this through the better-known story of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park, linking changes in elk behaviour and population pressure with vegetation recovery, beaver habitat and river systems. That Yellowstone story is often compressed into the claim that wolves “changed rivers”, when the real trophic and landscape interactions are more complex. The broad lesson is that removing or restoring one species can have consequences that move through food webs, vegetation, soils, water and habitat.
Stuart summarised the beaver’s role as ecological janitorial work. Beavers would accept the description if appropriately unionised.
Venison, deer and imperfect choices
The reference to deer led us into sustainable meat, ecological damage and a brief factual disaster in which Stuart asked whether veal was baby deer and I agreed. But later I found out we were both wrong! Veal comes from calves. Venison comes from deer. I think I may have caused a few folk to shout at the podcast while driving!
In landscapes where natural predators are absent and hunting is limited, deer browsing can prevent woodland regeneration and damage habitats. Managed culling is therefore sometimes used as part of conservation, with venison entering the food chain rather than being wasted.
I shared the example of East Norfolk Sixth Form College, where venison has been incorporated into catering as a locally relevant alternative to other meat. Stuart is trying to become vegan, with mixed success, so politely declined my invitation to eat venison lasagne and offered to watch me eat it instead.
This part of the conversation captured something important about Stuart’s comedy. Climate action shouldn’t be a contest to identify the purest person – Stuart talks openly about his own compromises, as do I, because audiences already knows they have theirs.
Fighting giant robots in the future
Did you know that Stuart used to fight giant robots from the future?
Mission: 2110 was a CBBC science-fiction game show broadcast across two series in 2010. Stuart played Caleb, portrayed as the last surviving human in a future overrun by robots called Roboidz. Children travelled forward from 2010 to complete challenges and help the resistance.
The enormous robot costumes were convincing enough to create a genuine safety problem, so some challenges involved children completing a task at a prudent distance while being told to watch out for the giant robot.
Much of the production was filmed aboard mothballed container ships on Loch Striven. We somehow turned this into a conversation about reuse, freight, wind-powered ships and the rediscovery of technologies humans had used before fossil fuels became dominant.
Stuart described himself as not being anti-coal in the historical sense. Coal supported industrial development and infrastructure that transformed societies. Previous generations used an energy source without initially understanding all its consequences. Now responsibility lies in what humans choose to do with the knowledge now available.
I really enjoyed this conversation with Stuart, especially as we focussed on what humour makes possible. Not just in what we said or talked about, but also our exchanges were often light-hearted and had a bit of banter in themselves.
Jokes can earn attention, lower defences and let people recognise their own contradictions without immediately feeling accused. They can offer relief from anxiety without asking people to forget why they are anxious. They can help an educator introduce safeguarding, inequality or ecological collapse while preserving enough lightness for the room to keep breathing.
If this is all done in context, and with recognition of where the power lies, then a joke can connect people, without humiliation or exclusion.
Stuart’s approach is brilliant because he begins with himself, by positioning himself inside the problem. He talks about the flight taken, the meat eaten, the tempting business-class seat and the awkward gap between knowing and doing. I would bet that a lot of the laughter comes partly from recognition.
Most of us live inside systems we know need to change. We use devices with troubling supply chains, travel within fossil-fuelled networks and make choices shaped by cost, time, health, family and infrastructure. People need challenge, but guilt and hopelessness can both become reasons to disengage.
While humour itself doesn’t solve that tension, it definitely can make it discussable.The Climate Action Venn Diagram offers another part of the answer – helping us to work out that we don’t alll have to perform the same form of climate action. Actions become more sustainable when they draw upon what people can genuinely offer and what gives them enough satisfaction to continue.
Stuart’s contribution happens to involve index cards, badgers, climate dread, giant robots, mayonnaise and very tall hair. That may not be everybody’s route into climate action, but it sure is unmistakably his.
