Modified On November 18, 2005
Laurie David had them rolling in the aisles last night at The Comedy Festival in Vegas:
“We’re calling for the country, the government, to admit global warming exists, admit humans are causing it and to start working on solutions now,” Laurie David says.
Stop, Laurie, you’re killing us!
In a cruel twist of fate, on the same day that David was wet-blanketing the house in Sin City, the wires were crackling with an upcoming report from the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, in which a killjoy Turkish egghead scientist concludes that global warming is caused by the sun. (Who would have thought?!)
Attendee Bill Maher was quoted as saying that “the environment is one of the hardest subjects to do in comedy. It doesn’t have an obvious, easy, funny target.” (Indeed! Try working “the signal of the quasi-biennial-oscillation in the extratropical stratosphere tends to be strengthened in solar minima, and weakened in solar maxima” into a punchline! Not even Jack Black could pull that off!)
Maher no doubt longs for the day when the topic du jour for serious, concerned standup comics was homelessness– remember Comic Relief? (Oh, the irony– while Comic Relief was raising oodles of cash for the homeless, a good chunk of openers and middle acts were living in their cars and sleeping on various couches throughout the U.S., unable to spare the required $15 for a Comic Relief T-shirt!)
The statement was part of David’s schtick during the taping of Earth to America, which airs Sunday on TBS at 8 PM EST.