Book Review: Film, Environment, Comedy: Eco-Comedies on the Big Screen

Abstract

Outlining the stereotypical characterizations of environmentalists in her influential Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age(2018), Nicole Seymour observes that whereas mainstream environmentalism and its media representations frequently evince sensibilities such as sanctimony and self-righteousness, a multitude of recent media objects, including films, appear to eschew such sensibilities, instead responding to environmental discourses through absurdity and irony, as well as “irreverence, ambivalence, camp, frivolity, indecorum, awkwardness, sardonicism, perversity, playfulness, and glee” (2018, 14). While Seymour’s important study of this irreverent turn engages with ecocinema specifically in one chapter, Robin L. Murray and Joseph K.Heumann’s latest collaboration, Film, Environment, Comedy: Eco-Comedies on the Big Screen, seeks to develop Seymour’s approach here, foregrounding the ironic and irreverent in a more sustained focus on eco-comedy films and offering a “strong companion for Seymour’s broad-based study” (2022, 4).