Objectives

As a significant component of protest culture, protest placards illustrate the way protesters see, understand and share their environmental concerns, and the School Strike 4 Climate movement is no different. In this paper we will investigate the communicative functions of humor in the SS4C placards, and what we can learn about the environmental messages involved. What is the role of humor in conveying (which) messages? And can protest placards be interpreted as means or vehicles of science communication—if so, how? Examining these questions, this paper contributes to the study of both the intangible cultural aspects of environmental communication [cf. Burns, O’Connor & Stocklmayer, 2003, p. 191; Kirby, 2017] and the role of humor in communicating environmental urgency. Elucidating the functions of humor [cf. JC Meyer, 2000] in environmental protest placards provides new perspectives for our understanding of humor in climate change activism and communication [Pinto & Riesch, 2017; Becker & Anderson, 2019]. Our study reveals new facets of how humor enriches informal public climate communication and diversifies the modes of humor in its academic discussion [cf. Osnes, Boykoff & Chandler, 2019]—how different modes of humor can be activated as a tool to reach, if not engage, diverse publics [cf. Merzagora, Aguirre, Boniface, Bricout & Martineau, 2022; Chan & Udalagama, 2021]. Similar to adopting an action-based approach to climate storytelling, using humor to communicate environmental messages can help deal with the anxiety and apathy that the current issue-based approach to climate storytelling provokes [De Meyer, Coren, McCaffrey & Slean, 2021, p. 11]. More broadly, this study clarifies the role of humor in times of environmental crisis and eco-anxiety [Panu, 2020].