Humor and sustainability - André Martinuzzi's interview with the Austrian public television

29/06/2019

As part of the Mother Earth campaign by the ORF, André Martinuzzi gave an interview on the show "Magazin 1" about his class "Humour and Sustainability" in the Management Master program at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

In his interview, André Martinuzzi emphasizes that he is not interested in ridiculing serious topics such as climate change or species extinction. Rather, humor is a useful method for highlighting negative social developments and unsustainable behavior. For example, when talking about a serious issue such as bee mortality, you cannot make fun of a dead bee, but you can make fun of a person who hates bees or does not care about their death.

In order to utilize humor to familiarize his students with the topic of sustainability, André Martinuzzi uses the example of the American comedian John Oliver and his weekly political satire show Last Week Tonight. The students follow the show’s example to develop their own comedy scripts. In preparation, they first research a specific sustainability issue in order to gain a well-founded understanding of the topic. Real humor, according to André Martinuzzi, requires not only creativity but also a fundamental knowledge and a deeper insight. In addition, working with professional improv theater actors increases students’ creativity that they use for writing the comedy scripts.

Humor, says André Martinuzzi, is "a good way to reach people who are no longer reachable through scientific facts and data". By using humor, it is possible to communicate the importance of complex sustainability issues, such as climate change, to a wider audience and thus to contribute to solving them.