Eugene Mirman

The Planet Gets Funnier.

Hooray for making planet-saving funnier. The American University just closed an Eco-Comedy Contest together with the Environmental Film Festival. Bless them for hunting down the funny in this sea of green seriousness. They received over 70 entries, and while the finalists included hardcore bikers, suggestive trash and some lewd vegetarian lyrics, the judges finally went with Green My House by Neeru Productions in Ireland (nobody likes sarcastic redheads).

Green My House is a look at some of the incredibly baller ways you can pimp your house green. Have you ever, for instance, tried the ever-sexy “swapping out your light bulbs”? Okay, so maybe we’re not ready to start a green SNL (or Whitest Kids, or The State, or Big Gay Sketch Show, or some other sketch comedy show you think is funny), but at least we’re moving past Artic Circle. Into creative endeavors that are actually amusing.

grist.org, for instance, has finally decided to let professional comedians, like Eugene Mirman and Aziz Ansari, donate some funny to their cause. Thank you, grist– you were killing us. Other semi-hopeful glimpses of a Sustainably Funny Future include the chuckle-inducing Green Shaman, or the “funny ’cause it’s true” work from Annie Leonard. She just finished a new video, the Story of Bottled Water, that will have you tearing up. With laughter. Okay, so maybe it will be the laughter of a deep and tortured pain. But funny is funny . . . right?

Go to the Green Museum

Land Art Internet Coma

Thanksgiving long past, and holiday feasts ahead, but I’m already stuffed, thank you, with this years’ steady eco-art diet of Land Art adventures and COP15 coverage. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed with art-nerd-glee. There is such a thing as an information coma, I swear.

The art-and-landscape dishes started churning out of the Nevada Museum of Art kitchen with its LAND/ART symposium way back in June: that event kicked off a summer-into-fall series of lectures, performances, exhibits and tours that made NMA the best excuse to want to go to Nevada since Burning Man. Later in the year Land Arts of the American West, a field program directed by Chris Taylor, took some lucky followers on a tour of renowned site-specific installations and Land Artworks. Unfortunately, some of us had to stay at home with our Winnebagos, experiencing most of the glory over the internet.

This month, while the delegates at COP15 tried to negotiate our way into a non-binding middle ground, Ian Garrett and William Shaw told us what artists were doing to mitigate the damage. There’s great coverage of actions, protests and memes by Shaw on the RSA blog– Garrett did comprehensive exhibition coverage and interviews for CSPA. It seems the artworks that struck the most resonant chord were also political actions: New Life Copenhagen, The Yes Men’s fake press release, actions that addressed COP15’s inaccessibility and ineffectiveness. Comedian Eugene Mirman voiced a couple of unanswered questions. The philosophical culmination is GOOD COP, an alternative Bella Center installed at Gallery Poulsen Contemporary Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where everyone from Daryl Hannah to Bill McKibben got some time on the mic to make their international declarations. If the dialogue keeps running this fierce, I’m not worried. That is to say: Burp.

Go to the Green Museum