Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Marcus Price/Netflix, Vitalii Nosach/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images, Matt Crockett/Netflix
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 and identifiable patterns start to emerge. Below, in chronological order, a collection of comedy’s most prominent Thunberg skeptics, evangelists, agnostics, and everyone in between.
By the time Thunberg was named “Person of the Year” at the end of 2019, all bets against anti-Thunberg bashing were off. On the day of the Time announcement, Chappelle was mocking the news on tour in Asheville, North Carolina. “How dare they import an angry white woman from Sweden?” he told an audience in a clip posted to YouTube by an attendee. “We got plenty of angry white bitches here … Every time she talks, I roll my eyes like Jeopardy: ‘I’ll take “Things Black people don’t give a fuck about” for $1,000, Alex.’” In a characteristically Chappelle move, he escalates the joke into shock territory: “How old are you, Greta Thunberg? 16? Get out of here. This is America! We’re going to let R. Kelly out of jail, and he’s going to pee on you.”
For the contrarian take to Chappelle’s perspective there’s Whitehall, who, in his Netflix special I’m Only Joking, calls Thunberg a “boss” who riles “dickheads” up by living her “best life.” “She is a child, and she’s raised a global climate-change revolution,” he says. “When I was a child, I couldn’t raise a Tamagotchi.”
Photo: Marcus Price/Netflix
A common thread in jokes about Thunberg is that, irrespective of whether her message about the climate is correct, she is annoying, which is the angle Jay takes in her Netflix special 3 in the Morning. “I hate that little fucking girl,” she begins. “And I hate that you can’t say you hate the little fucking girl because she autistic or whatever. That’s so stupid. I don’t hate the girl because she’s autistic. I’m not a fucking savage. I hate her because she’s annoying!” Jay’s biggest beef? The fact that Thunberg points the blame for the climate crisis toward adults like Jay. “Bitch, the shit was fucked up for me too!” she rants in her signature style. “What the fuck are you talking about? I didn’t walk onto a pristine Earth, bitch!”
Like Jay, impish comic Taylor stresses that he isn’t irritated by Thunberg because she has autism, but he’s irritated by her nonetheless. In his YouTube special So My Wife …, the Brit says he resents being told what to do by a 17-year-old, who should be spending her time getting “drunk” and “fingered” rather than lecturing the world on sustainability practices. “She’s telling people to make these huge lifestyle changes: ‘Stop driving. Start taking a train,’” he says before turning his attention to Thunberg directly. “Of course you think that. You’re Swedish. Your trains probably work!” Plus, he does care about the environment: He flatly refuses to wear condoms because they are a “single-use plastic,” and when hookups protest, he replies with a rallying cry: “I’m raw dogging for Greta!”
Kirkman can relate to Thunberg, she says, because she was once a young person who cared passionately about causes herself. But having been hardened by life experiences, she wants to save Thunberg the agony that comes with the slow embrace of fatalism. “I just want to take her and go, ‘Sweetie, we’re done here,’” she jokes on her album OK, Gen-X. “‘Girl, let’s just get a beer, and I’ll teach you how to smoke a cigarette.’” Kirkman zooms out and offers a larger point about a generational divide: “Gen X tried to save the world, knowing we probably couldn’t, but it’s the right thing to do. Young people are trying to change the world, thinking they can in their lifetime, and we’re like, ‘Oh my God! No one told them!’”
Not every comedian who jokes about Thunberg has a hot take. Sometimes, they just need a specific name they can drop into a joke that doesn’t require further explanation. When it comes to the topics of climate change, youth activism, or even autism, who better than Thunberg? Such is the case in this Normand joke about Joe Biden’s alleged habit of sniffing young girls’ hair. One can almost imagine Normand asking himself Who’s a young girl the audience will know? midway through writing this joke. “I was always hoping Joe Biden would meet Greta Thunberg,” he says, sketching out a hypothetical. “He sniffs her hair; he’s like, ‘Is it hot in here, or is it global warming?’”
Add one more to the list of comedians who are vexed by Thunberg. Santino agrees with her — he even commends her for having the “bravery and confidence” to stand up for what she believes in — but, like Taylor, he can’t abide being lectured by a teen without adult life experience. “You’ve never paid a mortgage, you dick,” he says in his Netflix special Cheeseburger. “You don’t know how hard this is. You’ve never got a parking ticket when you got 19 bucks left to your name. Shut up!”
As if to prove how recognizable of a reference Thunberg is, Maron gets big laughs in his HBO special From Bleak to Dark with a Thunberg joke that doesn’t initially name her directly. “What are you going to do about the climate?” he asks the audience. “Nothing! In the back of our heads, we’re like, You know, I don’t want to get in the way of anything that Swedish teenager’s doing …”
You’re not going to believe this, but Jefferies is also of the opinion that Thunberg is right but annoying. He even acknowledges how common of a stance this is for “men his age” at the top of this joke from his Netflix special High N’ Dry. He waited three long years for Thunberg to come of age so he could do this bit, he says, in deference to “women” who might be “triggered” by it. Unfortunately, all that extra time didn’t pay dividends in the form of revolutionary new premises. He defends his right to make fun of Thunberg, then 19, by saying he could legally have sex with her, before making a joke similar to Taylor’s (“I wouldn’t use a condom, either — out of respect for her and the environment!”). Then, like Jay, he balks at the idea that it’s his generation who ruined the planet. “Not my generation, Greta!” he clarifies. “You’re thinking of the cunts before me. The generation before me did fucking nothing. My generation invented the different-colored bins!”
In true Kinane fashion, his bit defending Thunberg in his YouTube special Shocks and Struts arrives nested within a defense of people with autism, itself nested within a defense of vaccine adoption. To his point about the world needing “more autistic kids,” Kinane cites Thunberg as a positive example, then illustrates the shallowness of her detractors’ arguments. “She’s trying to save the Earth from ourselves!” he says. “The best we can come up with is, ‘Ah, she’s, like, a girl, and she looks weird. She’s a kid. So nah.’”
The worsening climate is a determining factor in many people’s choices whether to have children, including McMahan, who talks about hesitating to implant an embryo she has “on ice” because she saw Thunberg on the news “freaking the fuck out” about the polar ice caps melting in her Netflix special Son I Never Had. She gets big laughs with an act-out of Thunberg’s histrionic speaking style. “It dawned on me,” she continues. “I was like, Oh my God. What if, right now, my baby girl is defrosting, and I don’t even know it?”
The planet is facing an overpopulation crisis, and if there is one demographic of people we could successfully kill off without large-scale consequences, Matts would like to cast his vote for leashed children. “No kid that’s ever been leashed has gone on to do great things,” he says in his YouTube special Progression. “Greta Thunberg? Definitely not. She sailed across the Atlantic. They don’t have leashes that long.”
Where some comedians on this list push back on the idea that the current generation is responsible for ruining the Earth, Gervais takes perverse pleasure in being part of the generation that will push the planet over its tipping point. Such is the premise of this joke from his most recent Netflix special Armageddon. “We’re going to be the first generation that future generations are jealous of,” he says with excitement. “I’ve got nine toilets in my house, and sometimes, I just run around flushing them for a laugh — just so that, in 40 years’ time, Greta Thunberg has to shit out of a window.”
Simmons-Patterson is neither for or against Thunberg so much as he is concerned about the moisturization of her skin. “If you’ve never seen her, she just looks like she’s always walking against wind,” he jokes in a Comedy Central set. “Every time I see Greta, I just want to put cocoa butter all over her.” He notes that Thunberg inspired him to stop using disposable grocery bags, but that his experience of leaving the grocery store with loose items in his hand, as a Black man, likely differs from hers: “There’s just a cop out there like, ‘Yo, what the fuck are you doing?’ I’m just like, “This is for Greta! This is for the environment!’”
Similar to Kinane, Macintosh’s pro-Thunberg bit in his YouTube special Down With Tech sees him doing a mocking impression of the ire she provokes: “She’s like, ‘Hey everybody, the Earth’s heating up. Maybe we should do something.’ Everybody’s like, ‘Shut up you Swedish witch! Are you even old enough to remember Family Matters? Go die! Why don’t you go back up the Alps and yodel, whore! I’m not listening to you.’”
When Brady references Thunberg in her recent Netflix special Autistic Beauty Queen, she also happens to make a case for why she’s referencing her in the same breath. “There’s not a lot of representation of hot women within the autistic community,” she says in a bit about her recent autism diagnosis. “I figured, Be the change you want to see in the world. It’s just me and Greta Thunberg, representing. She solves the climate crisis, I continue to do meaningless jokes about cum. We can’t all be heroes.”
Photo: Jennifer Clasen/HBO
Glaser believes we need kids “to save us from the state the world is in right now.” She just doesn’t know if it’ll be her audience’s kids who’ll be best suited for this task. Her specific audience, she jokes in her HBO special Someday You’ll Die, consists of people who “paid money to see a comedian who mostly talks about her pussy.” To prove her point, Glaser offers an example: “Greta Thunberg’s parents aren’t here tonight.”
No matter how Thunberg has been positioned in the popular discourse, Wakim does not see her as a positive beacon for the future. “That’s just older generations not wanting to change shit, so they pass it off on us and then they frame it as hope,” he says in a recent Don’t Tell Comedy set. Every time Wakim sees Thunberg getting arrested at a protest, he laments what it foretells about her future. “We’ve ruined her … She’s not going to have a normal life. No one is going to finger Greta Thunberg, okay? You can’t penetrate the voice of a generation. It’s wrong,” he says. “But that’s what I want for the world. I’m optimistic, you know? I want Greta to squirt. That’s progressive! If you’re liberal, you should want that for the world. That’s how you’ll know we have world peace: When she can relax enough to get there.”
