Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Senator Al Franken Makes Climate Change Funny In Collaboration With ‘Funny Or Die’ And National Geographic

How do you get the masses to pay attention to something they don’t want to hear? Well, you can write terrifying articles with doomsday headlines citing the latest calamitous science … or you can make ‘em laugh!

Senator Al Franken, who is a longtime environmental activist, is trying out the latter. In a recently released collaboration with the website “Funny or Die” and National Geographic’s “Years of Living Dangerously”, Franken gets frank (ugh, sorry) about the truth behind climate change. Which is to say, it’s real, it’s here, and we NEED to care about it.

“Boiling the Frog” is a series made up of six short episodes that touch on issues like who’s behind Washington’s inaction on climate change, what other countries are doing about it, and our country’s disappearing coal jobs. David Gelber, one of the series creators, says the name is a literal reference to a frog in a pot of boiling water.

“If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it’ll jump right out,” said Gelber in a press release, “It’s a shock to the system. But if you put a frog in a pot of cold water, place it on a stove and slowing start heating it up, it turns out the frog will stay in the pot and let itself get boiled. We’re living in a time where politicians are more like the frog in the heating pot. Despite climate change staring them right in the face they’re not taking life-saving action.”

Wow — what an absolutely petrifying analogy!

You can check out the first episode below and watch the whole series on funnyordie.com.

Becky Scott is the editor of The Schmooze. Follow her on Twitter, @arr_scott

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $325,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.