WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING AT?
MOST OF US WILL PROBABLY CHUCKLE AT THIS PHOTO, BUT WHAT’S FUNNY ABOUT IT – AND AT A TIME WHEN THE STATE OF THE NATURAL WORLD IS HARDLY A LAUGHING MATTER, IS IT OK TO FIND HUMOUR IN WILDLIFE, ASKS JAMES FAIR?
Some of the biggest talking points from Planet Earth II were about story lines that veered unsettlingly towards tragedy – the marine iguanas running for their lives from the racer snakes in Islands or the hawksbill turtle hatchlings crawling heart-breakingly towards artificial light sources on Barbados in Cities.
But arguably it was the moments of comedy that left audiences coming back for more – especially the 16–34-yearolds who, the BBC announced triumphantly, tuned in to the series in greater numbers than they did to ITV’s The X Factor. Think of the back-scratching bears and synchronised flamingos in Mountains and the fruit-and-veg stealing macaques in Cities. My two children – aged eight and five – couldn’t stop laughing at these sequences.
Mountains producer Justin Anderson says he’s been itching to film the bear footage for many years, so was delighted to finally nail it for this series. “I have two kids aged four and six, and I know as a dad that I can get their attention if I can make them laugh,” he says. “For me, humour is more universally appealing than a dramatic chase or action sequence.”
COMIC RELIEF
If that’s true, it does make you wonder why wildlife films, photography and even writing – and magazines – don’t include more humour. In fact, this was part of the thinking of wildlife photographer Paul JoynsonHicks when he set up the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards (CWPA) in 2015.
Co-organiser and fellow photographer Tom Sullam says the thinking was to have a competition that wasn’t serious and provided less of a barrier to amateur photographers. Joynson-Hicks and Sullam knew from their own experience of taking pictures of wildlife – mainly in Tanzania where they both live – that they frequently snapped funny moments that would never find an outlet, but they had no idea whether the images they received for the competition would be any good or if it would strike a chord with the public.
“But after we got massive press coverage in 2015, we realised people do like this,” Sullam says. Most of the winning or shortlisted images rely either on animals doing something that looks human, such as appearing to laugh or wave at the camera, or in them appearing to have goofed in some way – the brown bear that’s missed a leaping salmon ( right) is a good example.
“It’s very anthropomorphic,” Sullam admits. “We recognise human behaviour in the animals, but it removes any cultural barriers. It’s not Asian humour or North American humour, it’s cross-cultural.”
To emphasise this point, Sullam says that newspapers and websites from every country in the world apart from North Korea have used the photos. The 2016 awards had 2,200 entries from people in 75 different countries.
Mark Carwardine, a noted wildlife photographer who chaired the judging panel of Wildlife Photographer of the Year for many years, says there’s no problem in finding human characteristics in animal behaviour, as long the animal hasn’t been manipulated
to achieve this. “You can’t help but anthropomorphise, and if it helps to make a connection with wildlife, that’s a good thing,” he says. “If kids love watching a bear scratching its back, what’s wrong with that?”
FOSSILISED FUN
But it’s not just footage or photos of wildlife looking inadvertently foolish that make people laugh. Film-maker and conservationist Matt Brierley took a show to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2009 in which he aimed to convert audiences to his hypothesis that T rex was a pack-hunter not a scavenger.
It’s not the most obvious subject for a stand-up routine, but Brierley was getting 90 people a day at the fringe, and subsequently performed a 12-night sell-out run at a small theatre in Bristol (this is now available online). The humour is gentle rather than ‘laugh-your-head-off’ funny, but Brierley takes the audience on an absorbing journey around the world. He travels to Cremona, in Italy, to protest against the notion that T rex scavenged for its supper and later to the town of Dinosaur, in Colorado, to inveigle the mayor to sign a petition supporting his theory.
“I think people liked the fact that it was funny and it’s a true,” Brierley says. “And they like dinosaurs in general.”
With his conservationist’s hat on – he’s currently making a film about shark-finning – the comedian believes there is good reason to include more humour. “If you give people messages that are all unhappy, they just won’t work. There are hundreds of causes I should care
about, but I’m more likely to stop at something that makes me smile.” Helen Pilcher, a science-writer who has also done stand-up, says a similar argument applies to communicating science ideas. “You reach audiences you would not be able to otherwise,” she says. “I hope it means they are learning about stuff and being coaxed into your world.”
STANDING UP FOR SCIENCE
There’s an appetite for more intellectually driven humour, Pilcher points out, citing both Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage, hosted by Prof Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince, and Bright Club. Bright Club is a one-off – a comedy club that features professional stand-ups talking to scientists amusingly about their research.
If that sounds unlikely, then so does Pilcher’s book, Bring Back the King: the New Science of De-extinction, a humorous look at how technological advances could enable humans to bring longgone species back from the dead.
In the book, Pilcher writes about attempts to revive all manner of currently defunct species – the Pyrenean subspecies of the Spanish ibex known as the bucardo, the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, the northern white rhino and the Christmas Island rat are all put under the microscope.
De-extinction is not an easy subject to write about because both the science and ethics of it are complex; making it funny can entail contriving jokes out of subjects that are not replete with obvious humour.
The story of the bucardo is a good example. Before the last female died in 2000, scientists took samples of her skin cells, and in 2002 cloned a single offspring. Sadly, the kid survived only seven minutes, with an autopsy later revealing its lungs were deformed and it could never have lived. “The bucardo, so briefly back in the world, went extinct all over again, giving it the honour not just of being the first animal to be brought back from extinction, but the ignominy of being the first animal ever to go extinct twice,” Pilcher notes.
Perhaps you don’t find that funny or even consider it a subject meriting a joke, but it made me chuckle, as did much of the writing. More importantly, it tempted me to read on, knowing that on most pages there would be a little gift of a joke or a humorous aside that would lighten the otherwise serious subject matter.
NO LAUGHING MATTER?
So, should conservationists, film-makers and writers try to be funnier? Though Matt Brierley clearly finds humour in much of what he does, he can see why others don’t. “If you know what’s happening to the planet, it weighs very heavily on your mind, and 2016 has been a very taxing year,” he says. “I can see why people have a ‘doom and gloom’ outlook – it’s because they care about what’s happening.”
Plus, it’s not always easy to be funny. Just because you are an expert in why kittiwakes are declining in the North Atlantic or the socio-economic factors affecting lion conservation in East Africa doesn’t mean you have any talent for making people laugh.
Which is, perhaps, where the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards come in, because there’s no need for razorsharp wit to explain what’s funny about them. Personally, my favourite’s the image of the cheetah gazing down a track at a 40mph sign. “Don’t tempt me,” you can imagine the cheetah thinking to itself. That the cheetah is, of course, doing no such thing doesn’t make the image any less humorous.
‘DON’T TEMPT ME,’ YOU CAN IMAGINE THE CHEETAH THINKING, BUT IT’S DOING NO SUCH THING.”