ON THE face of it, global warming is no laughing matter. If Al Gore, George Monbiot and the thousand scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are to be believed, our great coastal cities are on the verge of being swallowed by the s
ea and our most fertile agricultural lands will soon be reduced to dust. Wars will start as countries squabble over dwindling resources, and as global capitalism comes juddering to a halt it will become almost impossible to get a decent caramel macchiato, even at Starbucks. On a comedian’s list of “Subjects Not to Touch With a Barge Pole”, then, you might expect climate change to feature at around about number three, just below paedophilia and the Holocaust, but for some reason stand-ups seem increasingly determined to tackle it on stage.
At the deadly serious end of the spectrum is Rob Newman, formerly of The Mary Whitehouse Experience, now a committed environmental campaigner, whose recent show A History of Oil was a brilliant demolition of US and British policy in Iraq and a stirring call to arms for the Green movement – but also conspicuously light on laughs. By contrast, Lucy Porter’s 2006 Fringe Show The Good Life claimed to be about the environment, but she sugared the eco-pill with so many gags about her love life that hardcore greenies in the audience may have walked away feeling short-changed.
Somewhere in between these two extremes sits Mark Watson. The Bristol-raised, Cambridge-educated, London-based comic has won a clutch of prizes since first popping up on the circuit at the start of the decade, most recently last year’s if.comedy panel award for capturing the spirit of the Fringe. Perhaps best known for his one-off marathon Fringe shows (last year’s lasted for 24 hours, and in 2006 he held out for an exhausting 36) Watson’s saucer-eyed, Welsh-accented stage persona has won him legions of fans in the UK in Australia.
By the start of 2007, finally enjoying serious mainstream success after years of hectic touring, Watson could have been forgiven for taking his foot off the accelerator and resting on his laurels for a while. But as anyone who has ever spent more than five minutes in his company will tell you, Watson doesn’t really do relaxed – he’s got more nervous energy than a sackful of cats – so when in January of that year he realised that he was “Crap at the Environment”, he decided to do something about it.
In the 18 months that followed he set up an online eco-community called CATE (short for Crap at the Environment) with more than 1,000 members and exhorted them all to make small changes to their lives while doing his best to stick to these directives himself. He convinced audiences at his live shows to accompany him on tree-planting missions, faced his lifelong fear of bike riding and was even taken under the wing of the Green Messiah himself, Al Gore. He also wrote a book about his experiences, Crap at the Environment – A Year in the Life of One Man Trying to Save the Planet, which is published this week.
In keeping with the reticent tone of much Green literature at the moment – books with titles like The Self Sufficient-ish Bible and Confessions of an Eco-Sinner – Watson does his best not to be preachy. His attitude is probably best summed up in his opening statement on the CATE MySpace page:
“On the question of whether one person, or even one person backed by an energetic group, can actually make any difference to the planet’s immense problems, my answer is: no, quite possibly not, but as a rule it’s better to try things and then afterwards say ‘well, that was a bit over-ambitious,’ than never try at all.”
You have to wonder though: is all this just another elaborate Mark Watson publicity stunt or is he really, genuinely committed to the environmental cause?
“Oh I’m in this for the long haul,” he says. “Certainly as a spokesman for the cause. I don’t want to look like a comedian who just got an idea for a day, did a show, wrote a book and then went off and did something else. And it’s not just a sense of duty – I really am quite keen to make it work as a comedy.”
Wringing laughs out of one of the most serious problems confronting humankind can be a tricky business, however. Marcus Brigstocke, another comedian who has recently attempted to address climate change in his work, describes it as “far and away the most difficult comedy subject I’ve ever dealt with”.
So far, Watson’s approach to the problem has been fairly straightforward: a clear division between his “normal” stand-up routine and his “green” comedy shows. His daily show at this year’s Fringe will be an hour of his usual good-natured, unfocused rambling with no environmental content to speak of, but he is in the process of perfecting a comedy version of Gore’s slideshow-turned-movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which he hopes to have ready in time for August 2009.
“I think if I made the whole climate change thing part of my regular comedy routine I’d be in trouble,” he says. “To try and fuse it with what I do normally wouldn’t just be difficult, it would also be unwise, because I don’t really want anyone taking anything I say too seriously at all in my regular stand-up. I quite openly set up the fact that I’m talking shit, so it would be a shame to have to say, ‘OK guys, let’s be serious for a minute.’”
Watson met Gore in Melbourne in September 2007, at a training course aimed at helping young activists to spread the Inconvenient Truth’s message. To begin with, the former US presidential hopeful didn’t seem too keen on letting Watson do “a sort of a comedy version of your lecture show” but eventually he gave it his blessing. Watson has performed it a handful of times since then, but it’s clear he still sees it as a work in progress:
“I did it for the first time at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in March this year,” he says. “It was a really intimidating affair and it was really tricky to do without seeming like I was taking the piss.
“I’m not doing it in Edinburgh this summer because I don’t think it’ll be quite ready. I’ll probably do it again in London sometime around the turn of the year and looking ahead to Edinburgh next year, by then I’ll probably have a pretty polished version of it. But the planet could have melted down by then.”
Although he has tried to cut down on the amount he flies, Watson still travels overseas a lot – notably to Australia, where critics and punters alike seem to have taken a real shine to him. Apart from setting fire to oil wells, flying around in jet planes is about the most efficient way of accelerating global warming known to man. Does Watson think high-profile ambassadors for the Green movement – himself and Al Gore included – should set an example by giving up flying altogether? Or at least by rationing the amount of flying they do?
“Yeah, to be honest I think it probably will come to that,” he says. “If I were to publicly say, ‘I’m going to ration myself to one flight a year,’ I don’t think anyone would care, but maybe if you had a collaboration of several hundred really well-known people who all said they were rationing their flights, I wonder what difference that would make. It’s certainly going to take something quite drastic.”
About a third of the way through Crap at the Environment, Watson runs aground on a shoal of angst. In a dispirited post on the CATE website, he writes: “The longer this goes on, the more aware I become that there are a lot of people doing, or attempting, very similar things to CATE. This is both inspiring and somehow existentially depressing.”
Does this thought still worry him, or has he managed to come to terms with the fact that he’s just one small cog – albeit a potentially important one – in a global movement?
“I’m much less worried about that now,” he says, “and I think that’s probably for the best. There’s always that thing where you’re trying to start a movement or have any kind of idea – you get it into your head that you’re doing something special and then it turns out that millions of other people are doing the same thing.
“It’s the same feeling you get when you do a joke and then you see another comic handle the same subject a bit better.”
“But now, after a year or so of CATE, I find it quite reassuring that there are lots of other people doing similar things, not least because I don’t think I can handle the burden of world environmentalism on my own.
“That’s quite a big ask. I think I’m more comfortable now as one mouthpiece for a big movement.”
• Crap at the Environment by Mark Watson is published by Hodder & Stoughton, price £12.99. Mark Watson’s Edinburgh Fringe show, All The Thoughts I’ve Had Since I was Born, is at the Pleasance Grand from 30 July until 25 August.
• For more information on CATE, visit
myspace.com/crapattheenvironmentThe full article contains 1663 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
