Laugh? We’re nearly fried..

HAVE you heard the one about the stand up comedian who tried to make global warming funny?

Matt Winning has. The Paisleyborn climate scientist started telling jokes on stage to “get out of the house” in the evening. He didn’t start bringing in greenhouse gases and climate targets until he ran out of other material.

The 38-year-old said: “I started a PhD in climate change at Strathclyde in 2008. I moved back home, I needed to get out of the house every night. I was living at home and I was 24.”

Matt worked the comedy circuit in Scotland and then, when he got a job as a climate researcher at a university in London, he’d be at the Edinburgh Fringe in the summers.

Then he ran out of weird surreal jokes about headless chickens and Robert Mugabe being his father.

He said: “I’d been doing comedy for a long time. I didn’t have a social life for eight years. I couldn’t do two jobs forever.”

For many comedians, their goal is to give up their day jobs and make a living from laughs. It wasn’t so straightforward for Matt. He said: “I was doing something with a purpose. I’d have to be pretty selfish to give that up to follow my passion.”

The solution was staring him in the face. It was time to put his research in front of a live audience.

He said: “I know more about climate change than anyone on the comedy circuit. But I’d always thought nobody wants to hear about that, it’s too tricky. But at the end of 2016, I commited to doing a show about climate change the next year.

“If it was a disaster, I’d at least go out with a bang.”

It took a year to work out how to mine a powerpoint about catastrophic carbon emissions for laughs. There were some “horrible gigs”.

“I was improvising jokes around a slideshow about climate change for 50 minutes. It took me a year of trial and error to work out how to do it.”

Turns out it was a good career move. Once he’d got the hang of the carbon offsetting gags, he settled into his new niche. He stopped doing regular comedy club gigs and started touring on his own as well as playing festivals and events. Businesses and charities invited him to perform at conferences.

Since then, he’s written a funny book about climate change, called Hot Mess, and is back at the Fringe with his show, also called Hot Mess.

He’s also become a father – which has made the burning issue of the planet’s future even more pressing.

He said: “Before my son was born, when I was looking at spreadsheets and numbers, I would be able to switch off the emotional part of my brain, compartmentalise it.

“But I now feel like everything is more real. There’s a sense of purpose, we have to push this for him. It also made me think of other people around the world having children. He’s in a good situation compared to families in other places that are already struggling.”

Matt dismisses the argument that population growth is fuelling the climate emergency.

He said: “Forty kids in sub-Saharan Africa will create the same amount of emissions as one child in the UK.

“What we need is to solve the lifestyles we have here, change the big things like transport and energy policy and make it easy for people to make good decisions.”

● Matt Winning: Hot Mess is at Assembly George Square Studios, August 3-14, www.assembly festival.com