featured-image

In September 2019, when climate-justice activist Greta Thunberg attended the U.N. Climate Action Summit and made international headlines by delivering a fiery address, comedians took the opportunity to make topical jokes.

That week, I saw Michelle Wolf perform at the Just for Laughs festival in Toronto, where she enlivened her set with material about the then-16-year-old Swede. Climate scientists everywhere, she imagined, must have been livid that the world was listening to an unqualified teenager after ignoring them for years. Had Thunberg been any other viral sensation, the shelf life of jokes like this would have been short.



If they’re not in the news, it’s only appropriate to make fun of a well-meaning kid who happens to have Asperger’s syndrome for so long. But then the story took a couple of hard turns: Days after her U.N.

address, Donald Trump started a feud with Thunberg on Twitter, and in December, Time named her its 2019 “Person of the Year.” Soon, Thunberg went from being a teenager with a righteous cause to a divisive figure in the ongoing culture war — and possibly the most prolific individual stand-up muse since O.J.

Simpson . Since the start of 2024, I’ve seen five jokes referencing Thunberg in filmed stand-up sets; going back to December 2019, that number is nearly 20. That comedians can’t seem to stop pulling from the Thunberg well says as much about Thunberg as it does the comedians who reference her.

Watch enough of their jokes back-to-back .

Back to Fashion Page