Former “Saturday Night Live” player and current U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-MN) is making climate change funny.
Because who says icebergs snapping off and floating away, impending food shortages and possible release of prehistoric diseases can’t be hilarious?
Franken teamed up with comedian David Letterman for the first season of a new web series, “Boiling the Frog with Senator Al Franken.” The series was created by the website Funny Or Die and “the geniuses behind ‘Years of Living Dangerously’,” as Franken describes the producers, to look at the “reality of climate change and the threat it poses to our very way of life.”
Because Mars ain’t an option, kids, and an iceberg the size of Delaware just cracked off Antarctica. Not really something icebergs should be doing.
“Years of Living Dangerously” was an Emmy-winning series by the National Geographic Channel on climate change. Letterman was in the first episode of season two which aired on Oct. 30, 2016.
“In Season Two we learned the value of integrating comedy into climate change storytelling,” “Years of Living Dangerously” executive producer Joel Bach explained to ThinkProgress in an email. “We decided that if we were ever to do a short-form series on the intersection of politics and climate, Senator Al Franken would top the list.”
“Fortunately, Senator Franken loved the idea and the result is ‘Boiling the Frog,’ a series that we hope will give audiences a sense of the many hurdles lawmakers face when trying to make progress on climate. All with a few laughs.”
In the “Years of Living Dangerously” episode “A Race Against Time,” Letterman traveled to India to see how the country is battling climate change with an increase in solar power use.
Franken, a fierce champion against climate change denial, asked Letterman in one of the “Boiling the Frog” episodes, “Dave, when you were in India, why did you seem so stupid?”
The two also discuss who the insiders are causing inaction in the capital, why President Trump doesn’t understand the real reason coal jobs are disappearing and how to use Letterman’s impressively snowy post-“Late Show” beard as a weapon against carbon emissions.
You can watch the entire web series right now on FunnyOrDie.com, but since clicking links is hard, we’ve provided the series embeds below.
Get ready to laugh so hard, you’ll cry, or laugh just to keep from crying.
