In the summer of 2020, as bushfires blackened Australia and incinerated more than a billion animals, self-described “investigative humourist” Dan Ilic sat on the beach holding back tears.
“What do I do?” he asked himself. “What is within my power to do?”
The answer came to him: Make funny videos.
“Right now we all have to do things within our own power to help us move rapidly to a fossil-free future. And I don’t build solar panels, mate. So I’ve got to do mine,” he says.
Ilic decided to use humour to drive home an unfunny truth – that Australia is failing to respond to an oncoming catastrophe.
Birth of a comic career
Ilic has been making people laugh since he was a kid performing in the Cumberland Gang Show, a musical tradition handed down from the Guides and Scouts. His career kicked off when sketch comedy gigs at Macquarie University led to a tour with the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and, ultimately, to Channel Ten, where he joined The Ronnie Johns Half Hour. From there he moved to Andrew Denton’s hit show Hungry Beast. Along the way he founded a Sydney comedy club and did satirical campaigns for activist group GetUp!
It was a natural progression. “Comedy is the first love. And then satire comes straight after and then satire weaponises comedy. And I think there is a fun power imbalance where the jester can have a spear,” Ilic told The Brilliant.
“If I can suck all the power out of someone’s message this way, it builds the other message this way, and empowers the truth this way,” he adds.
One night Ilic found himself on a panel with comedian Rod Quantock, who told him, “I’m getting rid of all my other material and all I’m going to be doing is material on climate change, because there’s nothing else to talk about.” That lodged in Ilic’s mind.
In 2012, Ilic created a show called A Rational Fear, and took it to the FBi Social Club in King’s Cross, Sydney. A current affairs comedy, it had panellists weighing in on topics of the day, from marriage equality to the Mayan Apocalypse that had so spectacularly failed to arrive. One of the early panels featured filmmaker Liz Courtney, just back from documenting Alaska’s melting permafrost.
“So, from the very start, A Rational Fear had climate involved,” says Ilic.
Courtney’s work made an impression on him, and in the decade since, A Rational Fear has evolved into an incendiary comedy-based form of climate change activism. It’s a space where comics and experts convene to savage the news, and it’s broadcast via podcast, YouTube channel and other social media platforms.
“We try and do it in a way that’s funny and smart, so people might be caught unawares and change their point of view.”
The show’s name acknowledges the existential dread that comes with the turf. Ilic hopes that laughing at rational fears about our future takes the anxiety out of it enough that his audience can “face what is in front of them with fresh eyes”.
It’s passion that drives him. “I’m focused on climate action,” he says, adding, “making jokes about climate change isn’t incredibly lucrative. It doesn’t really pay the bills.”
Even after being immersed in the politics of climate change for nearly a decade, Ilic sounds as if he can’t quite believe how short-sighted Australia’s politicians are, continuing to support coal and gas. “What the market is saying right now is that coal futures are dead. Oil futures are on the slide and the future is renewables. Australia will need to transition to new forms of energy to stay competitive. If only there was some place where there’s sun and water to make stuff like green hydrogen,” he says sardonically.
As he speaks, he becomes animated.
“What makes me angry is that there is so much falsehood being peddled, and it hurts; it’s terrible,” he says. There could be thousands of jobs in the renewables sector, he adds. Instead, “we’re going to keep subsidising gas as a ‘transition fuel’. Transition fuel doesn’t exist. We could build hydrogen, green hydrogen, straight away.”
A Rational Fear continues to ramp up in no small part because Ilic won a grant from the Bertha Foundation, a European-funded organisation that gives grants to activists, investigative journalists, storytellers and lawyers. Ilic used that funding to release a podcast each week, and to take live comedy shows to places affected by climate change, like the Hunter Valley and Cairns, COVID permitting.
Blowing their minds
Ilic is all about impact – with purpose. “I am an activist and everything I do is tied to an outcome,” he explains. “Making something to change something.” He puts most of his energies into podcasts, because he knows young people will still engage with them, unlike television, which they’ve abandoned in masses.
Ilic works with scientists and experts to make sure the factual basis of his message is spot-on. “I want to make sure it’s correct or to make sure I’ve got the most incredible unknown fact in there. And so I’ll work with people who specialise in this particular topic,” he explains. “If I can pack a fact and a joke together, hopefully that is good enough to explode in someone’s brain,” he says.
He also invites people on to tell their personal stories. In 2020, A Rational Fear featured Professor Hilary Bambrick, an environmental epidemiologist at the Queensland University of Technology. “She was saying that at the back of her backyard, coal trains would go by and dust would appear on the paintings of her children. That’s stuck in my mind.”
A podcast in November 2020 featured a powerful testimony of the impact of flooding on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, where Yessie Mosby talked about “his ancestor’s remains being washed away in a monsoon and having the grandkids run and grab bones of his family, so they can re-bury them in the middle of the island.”
Ilic says that personal stories are powerful and effective, “and we like to tell them”.
What comes next
One of the difficulties of talking about climate change is that once people understand the magnitude of it, they can become overwhelmed and despondent. Ilic was not immune to that, but, like so many others, he was also compelled to act.
That day on the beach, Ilic decided on the spot to contact writers, producers and graphic designers, to help him create a video. “I started composing a letter saying, ‘Hi, I’m Dan Ilic, I’m a comedian. I’m looking for money for this’.”
Within minutes, he not only had a creative team, but he’d raised the $6,000 he needed.
The resulting video, Who Is Responsible For The Bush Fire Crisis? was biting, informative and tightly-scripted, highlighting government failures going back decades. Though voiced by Tim Minchin, it wasn’t funny at all. But it made an impact. “It probably had 400,000 or 500,000 views on Twitter and YouTube,” says Ilic.
“At some point, I’d love to see A Rational Fear on television,” he says. “I want to build out a team and make climate communications for every region, every country, and push out meaningful, targeted communications around climate change in smart, funny ways.”
But besides smarts and laughs, there’s another essential ingredient.
“I try to give a little bit of hope in everything we do,” he says. ”The show’s called A Rational Fear. So it’s about laughing in the face of doom.”
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Article by Kylie Ahern
Photo Credit: Photo supplied