If you had told me six months ago that I would soon be performing standup comedy to dozens of strangers, I would have assumed it was a bad dream.

Public speaking ranks about as high as driving in rush hour traffic through downtown Boston on my list of favorite activities. That I would choose to do standup, with its potential for public humiliation, is basically unimaginable.

And yet, in late April, there I was, spooling out jokes about AI, the manosphere, gnomes, immigration and my three-year-old nephew.

I hadn’t signed up for a comedy class because I’d always dreamed of doing standup; I was there because the daily dread of political and planetary freefall had become untenable.

In 2019, a convergence of grim climate predictions had catapulted me into despair. I climbed out about six months later after finding a community that shared my grief and helped me move through it. But relief isn’t permanent. And for anyone paying attention, things are not looking good.

To my detriment, I have a habit of jumping into the deep end. Last year, I spent months interviewing the scientists who set the Doomsday Clock, a graphic representation of how close humanity is to self-annihilation. As you might imagine, adding nuclear winter and bioweapons to my panic list didn’t help. (Yes, I’m fun at parties.)

I don’t want to numb out or come unglued. So when I found a listing for the most unlikely of antidotes, I had to try it.

Climate comedy. What?!

I signed up.

Over a decade ago, Belina Raffy, an improv consultant and comedy coach, grew concerned that dire warnings about climate change were making people shut down in fear and guilt. At the same time, those trying to communicate the crisis were in danger of burning out from overwhelm.

She developed a course called Sustainable Stand Up to help people working on social and environmental issues find humorous ways to share serious messages. Since then, she has taught the course, internationally and online, to everyone from Nasa climate scientists to human rights lawyers, Extinction Rebellion activists, humanitarian workers and more.

This iteration was for members of the Climate Psychology Alliance, therapists who help people navigate the psychological toll of living through the climate crisis.

I’m not a climate-aware therapist, as these professionals call themselves, but I could have used one. In 2019, when I told therapists I was distressed by wildfires and mass extinctions, they asked about my mother or suggested an ADHD screening or thyroid test. None of that helped. What did was finding other people to ask existential questions and cry with, who validated that big feelings might be an appropriate response to scary times.

Raffy’s class offered something tantalizingly different: could I learn to find lightness in the dark?

We know that laughter has physical and emotional benefits. And though more research needs to be done, there’s promising evidence that learning to do comedy is good for mental health: it helps people reframe difficult experiences, build social bonds and gain confidence.

In the past few years, the UK’s National Health Service has even begun to offer standup classes as a mental health intervention as part of its expanding “social prescribing” program, in which patients are referred by healthcare providers to non-clinical services and activities, such as exercise classes, art classes or social services, to support holistic wellbeing.

Might doing comedy help us to show up with more resilience when the difficulties we face are collective, political and planetary?

The seven-week online course would culminate in a live online show. And I wanted in.

For the first class, in mid-March, we Zoomed in from our homes. The class was limited to six participants due to its intensity.

Karen Taylor, a trauma therapist based in Hartford, Connecticut, was drawn to the invitation to combine play, art and creativity with her commitment to climate psychology. Jessica Bleuer, a professor of drama therapy in Montreal, hoped comedy would help her communicate with people across political differences. Jeremy Lehrer, a therapist based in Brooklyn, was intrigued by the opportunity to try to express his values in a comedic form.

I was the only non-therapist. I was anxious and edgy, slogging through a Boston winter that refused to end, sapped by teaching, waking every day to worse news. I was relieved when our first exercise wasn’t comedy, but a rant.

Raffy asked each of us to pick something that made us grumpy. Not the red hot thing, more like a six out of 10. We needed to ease in before tackling the big stuff, she cautioned.

We took turns ranting for a minute each – perimenopause, entitled people. I could have gone on about customer service chatbots for ages.

After each rant, Raffy asked us to describe “the beautiful thing” the ranter cared about. The group told me I cared about labor justice, human connection, communication and flexibility. It made me feel like a “very good person”.

Still, when Raffy told us to write three jokes for homework, just like that, I was back to grumpy. As I wrote rambling, pointless notes, I wondered: did I even know what a joke was?

When Raffy saw An Inconvenient Truth sometime around its release in 2006, she left the theater in a panic. The vision of a harrowing future activated a prepping instinct: “I want to get into a Hummer and go shopping with a big shotgun,” she thought.

Unsettled by her visceral response, she reflected that there was a danger in delivering such frightening information with little regard to what emotions it might ignite in viewers.

Al Gore, she thought, seemed like kind of an asshole.

Around that time, Raffy was beginning to develop improv workshops for businesses and NGOs; in 2014, she built on that work to offer her first standup class in Baltimore.

At first, Raffy was primarily concerned with helping people doing good work communicate more effectively. But she discovered that the internal, emotional process of finding the “expansive, joyful aspects” of their work was just as important for participants.

Raffy teaches what she calls “loving comedy”, an approach informed by the psychology of humor.

As it turns out, not all humor is good for us. Humor that is used to amuse and affirm others, build social bonds, and regulate emotions by finding amusement in difficult circumstances is psychologically beneficial. But humor that is used to mock others, overly disparage the self, or avoid facing difficult feelings, is detrimental.

Our aim, Raffy told us, was to come from a place of, “I love myself. I love the audience. ‘The system’ is silly. And share what would be awesome.”

That’s all becoming more difficult lately, she admits. In the polycrisis we are living through, people are so activated that they want to jump straight into the fire. She’s been trying to offer more structure and bite-size exercises to help participants access their “unique wisdom”. That first week, she planted seeds for our first jokes by having us brainstorm what made us especially wise or quirky as children.

I remembered how I used to make “fairy feasts” as a child, filling acorn caps with flower petals. How every day of fourth grade, I wore a long fleece stocking cap, decorated with lizards and frogs. How I sobbed when I learned that the live lobsters I had been playing with on the kitchen floor were bound for our dinner plates.

I couldn’t see how any of it would become a joke, particularly about anything that mattered. But I felt a little affection for that insistently weird and empathetic kid who had believed so passionately in the magic of the world.

Things started to shift in the following weeks, as I studied the sample sets Raffy sent us and hunted for joke material throughout my day, seeking absurdity in mundane frustrations. Inscrutable bureaucratic speech during one of my faculty meeting was actually a coded message, evidence of a highly covert operation. I hadn’t wasted hours trying to figure out where to responsibly dispose of a lithium battery; I was Frodo on a dangerous quest to Mount Doom to destroy my precious.

I kept a running list of ideas in my phone. I told my friends I had to do my “joke homework”.

One lesson on joke structure especially stuck with me. First, Raffy explained, you create a “circle of expectation”. Then, in the punchline, you leap outside that circle while still playing by its rules. “What happens,” she asked, “when we map one domain or pattern on to a different one?”

I immediately thought about AI.

Emily Strasser performs her standup routine

I wanted to rant about all of AI’s sins, from labor exploitation to amplifying risks of nuclear war … But Raffy’s advice was to pick a six instead of a 10, so I focused on one fear: that in a world of large language models, the skill of writing will become like knitting – a beloved craft, but an optional hobby – rendering my job as a professor of writing obsolete.

If the expectation is AI’s inevitable takeover, what would its opposite look like? What if knitting became a graduation requirement?

I imagined a world in which the universities indoctrinate students in the “radical woke ideology” of knitting, transforming women’s work into the latest alpha male status symbol. I envisioned a culture shift where the manosphere bros start livestreaming knitting sessions, eventually “fibermaxxing” by raising their own sheep and spinning their own wool. I built to the requisite penis joke.

“Spin that fiber long and thick,” I said, fanning myself. “Hot.”

Then after a pause: “I’m gay, but even I can’t resist the insulating power of a wool sweater.”

It felt good to transform a helpless thought into something silly and playful. It felt good to imagine that my fellow professors and I could be as powerful as those who call us the enemies say we are.

The political potency of comedy is ancient and evergreen. From the archetypical trickster to the medieval court jester to Stephen Colbert, fools have always been subverting social order, revealing hypocrisy and challenging authority.

But it’s not easy to make light of nightmares, especially for beginners. Raffy wanted our sets to land on some sort of possibility or call to action that was also, somehow, light and playful. That was a hard ask for a Zoom full of people used to holding personal trauma beside planetary pain. We all wanted to say the thing, and our sets veered into speeches, rants or laments.

Bleuer, the drama therapist in Montreal, beautifully captured our collective despair in an early version of her set. “As a Latina Canadian whose best friend is from Iran, me finding hope looks like,” she paused, looked around the room, searched the ceiling as if to find hope scuttling there like a spider.

We began to smile as we saw the joke coming.

She tried again, haltingly, “like um, I – I find hope in – the um … OK, so I cry. So I cry.”

We released our laughs in recognition.

Then she spun into a poignant defense of crying as a healthy response to the world. “There’s a whole world in a tear … I speak the truth in a tear. The world is really sad. Let’s cry together.”

We nodded, solemn, a bit glassy-eyed.

“This is a comedy course,” Belina reminded us, as she offered suggestions for finding something funny in a tear.

In her final set, Bleuer imagined a movement of crying activists.

“Oh fuck! The crying activists are back! They teared us again,” she acted out an irate legislator arriving to his office in sopping clothes.

Everyone laughed.

Rebecca Weston, co-executive director of Climate Psychology Alliance North America, had taken the class in the winter. It felt like a necessary response to the relentless dread.

“Part of authoritarianism,” she said, “is shutting down the parts of ourselves that can remain open, that can remain joyful, that can remain connected to others through play. And when … that gets much more rigid and brittle, I think huge parts of our own capacity suffer.”

But while watching the horrors unfold in Minneapolis and doing her own rapid response work in New York, sometimes Weston’s fear and anger felt too big for the class. She considered dropping out.

My own too-big anger flared up during a one-on-one coaching session a couple of weeks before our final show. I had built my set by using my teaching, knitting and three-year-old nephew Jack’s love of gnomes to comment on AI, toxic masculinity, environmental concerns and immigration justice (all are welcome, except for “Kristi’s Gnomes”).

But I was struggling to find an ending.

What if, Raffy suggested, you invite the gnomes and your nephew and the manosphere bros to engage in some beautiful possibility together?

Some flaming righteous rage shot through me and I cried right there on Zoom. I didn’t want those hateful, dangerous men anywhere near Jack, a sweet, goofy, energetic kid who stomps through puddles, meows to my cats over FaceTime, and investigates birdhouses at hardware stores in search of their resident gnomes. I want to protect a world in which he can be playful and kind and curious and brave, in which every child can be.

I had reached a limit of my playfulness.

For a few days after that, I walked around all up in my feelings, wondering if this thing had been one giant mistake. Weston had stuck with the class and ultimately found her way through her anger to a set that felt affirming. I wondered if I could do the same.

Underneath the anger, I knew, was that ferocious instinct to protect. What was funny about that?

When I finally had an idea, though, I hurried to dismiss it. Absolutely too vulnerable. Surely, I will not let them see the silliest, witchiest most cringy and earnest version of me.

I scrambled for other ideas.

I have had many dreams of being thrust inexplicably into a situation for which I am completely inadequate. You know the type – didn’t study, wrong clothes, missed the meeting.

Some days, it feels like we’re sharing the worst version of that collective bad dream. No one prepared us to face all of this – the climate crisis and fascism and the AI assault of all we hold dear, all at once. We don’t have the skills … We are not the kind of people who …

I am not the kind of person who does standup. But here I was, feeling a little faint, searching a grid of unfamiliar faces for the few guests I had invited. And then I did the thing I had not wanted to. I asked a bunch of internet strangers to join me in a big, goofy “spell” of protection, one I had originally made up for my three-year-old nephew on the solstice.

“Stop it!” we yelled together, to Kristi’s Gnomes and all the others who are spreading fear and hatred, thrusting our palms forward in the gesture of “halt!”

I felt ridiculous and powerful all at once.

Jack was there on the screen, in a sun-drenched living room with his mom and dad. He shoved his hand out, too, grinning and yelling.

Doing amateur standup is a silly, tiny thing. It won’t save the planet and it doesn’t replace any of the vital work of resistance and legislation and new world-building. And believe you me, I’m still angry and scared as hell. But standup helped me reconnect to my young, silly, tender heart, and showed me capacities I didn’t know I had.

Stretching to find funny, authentic ways to talk about the things that keep us up at night, the therapists and I had found a way back to ourselves.

“These times are meant to make us feel confused and there’s so many competing needs,” said Bleuer, who dubbed herself the niche superhero “the tear fairy” in her set. “Maybe re-tapping into what we know about ourselves prepares us for resistance better.” The comedic process had helped to reaffirm the political importance of her work as a therapist.

Maybe we leap outside the circle of our own expectations and find we were already there.

And so I geared up part two of the spell: “To all other gnomes, to the immigrants and queer people and trans people, to anyone who wants to care for this earth and each other and knit together, we say ‘welcome.’”

And we flapped our hands rapidly at our shoulders, ululating our hearts out.