- Welcome to the Skoll World forum
on social entrepreneurship, coming to
you live from Oxford, England.
This morning we're talking about
the power of comedy to create social change.
I've got a fantastic guest to discuss this with,
Erika Soto Lamb.
I'm gonna challenge you to insert
some serious comedy into our conversation here.
I think the power of comedy is really fascinating
because it's all about being subversive.
It's all about challenging power
and imagining possibilities.
You are vice-president of Comedy Central.
It's a TV channel, for those who don't know,
with a lot of original comedy shows
from South Park to the Daily Show.
Your role is to enable audiences
to have impact and create social change.
You promote collaborations between comedians
and policy advocates and before that
you worked on preventing gun violence during
the Sandy Hook attack.
I was really interested to hear about
your new project, and yes, Laughter Lab.
Is that right?
- Absolutely, it's Yes And... Laughter Lab.
- Yes And.
- Very close, thank you.
- You're working with a host of immigrant organizations
to tell their own immigrant comedy stories.
Tell me more.
- Thank you so much for having me.
I'm so excited to be here at Skoll
where the theme is accelerating possibility.
I think comedy is one of the many ways
in which we can do that.
We can really light a fire under
so many good ideas to address
so many of the world's problems.
Yes, I am the head of social impact
at Comedy Central.
It's a fairly new role.
My background, as you stated,
is in social change within issues organizations.
Worked in politics and so I really got
to see the other side and see the role
of culture in creating change.
At Comedy Central I am looking
for ways to evolve the culture of comedy
from what has been critique and commentary,
and certainly the politics or social issues
of our time have always been the fodder
of what makes us laugh,
astute criticism of what's going on.
I think it has also often ended at the punch line
and ended at the joke.
My role, I see it as an opportunity
to evolve from just the laugh
and go beyond that to create action.
That begins by educating our audience,
engaging our audience, and then equipping them
with the tools to create change
on the issues that we believe in.
You can't do that every day.
Certainly you mention that it's subversive,
and it is sort of slipping in the vegetables
into the food.
There's also, I think, an opportunity
to bring people together and find
the moments when we can be explicit
about how we want comedy to contribute
to creating positive change for the world.
- Your role, is it about coming after
the comedians do their work as well
as with projects, or are you working
throughout the whole of Comedy Central
on a host of different comedians, shows, activities,
in order to think more strategically
about social change?
- Ideally not at the end.
Of course, sometimes, that's when
you get the opportunity.
Ideally the work happens in concert.
As we are creating the recipe and baking,
that this is a part of what's in mind.
How do we connect what we're having laughs about
to the social issues that are important
and how do we engage our audience to do more.
Much of the work, I'm in them mix
as, you know, the writing is being done
and things are being filmed so that
it isn't an after thought.
It should be a part of the DNA of the brand
and how we communicate with our fans.
- You talk about social change as if
there were a unified consensus
of what social change looks like.
I'm sure amongst the comedians
who work for you and all your shows,
there's a host of different, a panopoly
of different scenarios and different objectives
in terms of what they individually want to achieve.
How do you square that circle?
- Absolutely.
There's a long list of concerns
for this moment in time for all
of us around the world.
One of the first things that I did upon arriving
in this new position just about six months ago
was to do the research.
I think that partly comes from my background working
in policy is that you have to know,
you've gotta know the facts.
- But they're not facts.
Surely there's different perspectives.
Data on what
- On what we believe in.
- Okay, as a company.
- As a company and also with our audience.
We test pilots.
We ask our audience what they think about programming.
What they find funny.
We had never asked them before,
what do you care about.
What are you concerned about?
- Is that kind of intriguing isn't it,
because it isn't as if you have
an agenda to let's say solve the,
help the SDG challenges.
You're driven by what the audience care about
and then you help accelerate in that way.
- Absolutely.
- That's kind of curious in a way though
because it's less about achieving certain goals,
it's more about becoming a more successful company,
you can argue.
- Well I think that the company affects
our, in tandem.
My role primarily is to create positive change.
I think it's particularly difficult
to do it in a broad way on all of the issues.
It does make sense to get specific
and say this is the issue that we want
to leverage comedy to help create change on.
- What issues do you think comedy
can be most successful at creating change?
- We have yet to announce what our signature issue will be.
I will tell you that I think comedy
is about the human condition.
Comedy in its material brings into life
what we experience.
There's so many human rights concerns,
so many parts of our lives as human beings
that can be further exposed and can also serve
to help people and address those really,
it's a pretty broad category that
I just stated to you.
I think that it's already doing that work
of making fun and, you know, bringing laughs
to the issues of what we deal with
and now we can go a little bit further.
- You'd like to draw upon your own experience
growing up, you're Mexican-American,
you're growing up on the El Paso border.
- Yes, I'm from El Paso, Texas
which is on the border of Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico.
It is a place of great interest right now.
As you know, issues of immigration around
the world are a major concern.
You mentioned earlier that we just launched
in partnership with the Center for Media
and Social Impact at American University
and a creative agency called Moore and Associates,
a project called Yes And Laughter Lab.
Yes And is a term from improv.
The ability to keep a conversation going,
yes and... I have something else to say.
The way that I view Yes And is yes we can
be funny and we can create change.
What it essentially is is a call for applications,
for people from the comedy and social justice space
to propose ideas.
This is the first year.
It's a part of that evolving the culture
of comedy from critique to social action.
We didn't know what to expect.
We thought, we hoped in a probably two week window,
we hoped to get a hundred applications.
We received 500.
There's a real appetite.
- Tell me about some of the applications,
some of the ideas.
- It touches on all of the issues.
You mentioned immigration.
One of the organizations that we're working
with is called Define American,
because that is a central question
in our country of who are we,
what do we stand for, what have
we stood for, what are we going to stand for,
what does it mean.
That organization, which does a lot
of the front line work on immigration advocacy
and direct service with immigrants,
we are here to employ comedy to find
a way to get at the root of, you know,
the culture change required.
- When they put an application in to you,
do they have to include the jokes?
Or are they saying these are issues
that they want submitted?
- The organization that we are partnered
with to try to find the comedians.
- Okay, so they're going to be working
in that community to find those people,
comedians from that community.
- We are taking from a pool of comedians
who have ideas.
They are bringing jokes into the mix
of certain issues.
The issues span, immigration, gender, climate, change,
mental health.
I think anything that there is major concern
about in the world, we received some good ideas
on here's how I would leverage my skills
in comedy, the comedians, to create change.
We've selected, we will soon be announcing five
of those projects that will receive
a stipend and then will come together
at a convening, which is a room
of funny people and social justice people.
They're not mutually exclusive, of course.
There are funny people who are
also social justice advocates
and there are social justice advocates
that are funny.
There hadn't yet been a room in
the United States where we get together.
The purpose is sparking more collaboration,
because comedy is a incredibly powerful tool
to change hearts and minds, to move people along
that spectrum of culture change
to political change that eventually results
in the policy change that can improve people's lives
and change the world.
- I want to take this moment to do a drawing.
We are drawing all of these different ideas
in these interviews here at the Skoll World Forum.
I thought we perhaps can attempt,
without having discussed or thought about it,
how to paint and draw a picture
with these lovely, smelly pens.
- Yes, I can't wait.
- About how comedy is used for social change.
Shall we begin?
- Yes, let's do it, okay great.
- What color do you want to go for?
- Purple, purple is my favorite color
and I expect it to smell like grape.
- It does.
- A strange smell.
- Sort of fake grape.
- I got strawberry.
- None the less.
I was thinking that we could do a comic strip.
A really simple one because this is about comedy.
- Yes, sounds good to me.
- Maybe like three frames that show
the process of how comedy can create culture change.
- Social change, so the first strip long
and thin.
- Maybe like a rectangle.
I think it's probably three strips
or you know, three steps in how we're gonna do it.
- Then you can do the other side.
- To wrap our head around.
The start is culture.
People watch television and YouTube videos
and movies, on their phones, it's on the telly.
Maybe we do the people
who are engaging.
- Some people are are in here,
people are engaging in that space.
- Here's, you know, the bullhorn.
That's what I feel like we are at Comedy Central.
All these waves of information
that, you know, maybe there's just there to laugh, ha ha.
But I do think that we have
an incredibly engaged audience.
There's a lot of programming, like the Daily Show,
that is already quite ..
- Powerful
- Engaged on issues.
I might even say that in this frame
the people are sitting on a couch.
They're not, does that look like a pillow.
- That's a couch here.
They're coming together.
There's a community so people aren't just watching
individually.
There's community, collaboration.
- Yeah I see them now.
They might be together, they might be alone,
but I think as we progress in our frame
there's gonna be more of them doing the things.
- Together, okay.
- We're using content to create more thinking
on certain issues, then that's going
to change who we elect and what we do
in our work and what we prioritize
in our culture.
How we think about immigration, for example.
- You have a go.
- I'm going to represent, you know,
just as a symbol of government.
- Yeah, that looks good.
- This would be like Washington.
- That looks good, okay.
- It's got those lines now.
- It's got those little sort of whatever they are.
- There's like important steps leading
up the way to this.
- That's clever.
- Most people don't get to access
these centers of power.
This is intended to reach the centers of power.
We're using Washington just as an example.
Obviously this relates to business
and the other cultural elements
where decisions are made.
This is the people, this is the power.
I think what we aim to do in culture change
for social impact is to, you know,
empower more of the people.
I'll go back to making my stick figures.
Maybe they're holding signs
as a representative of taking positions.
- In a way they are becoming politicized.
Is it about politicizing people?
Making people feel they're agents
of their own lives rather than just consumers of.
- I would go with becoming change agents.
Politics is one part of that.
I also think that that might be limiting.
Some people create change by doing.
Some people might see a problem
and know, I want to be, excuse me,
a direct part of creating change
by volunteering in the domestic violence shelter
in my community.
Other people decide to start knocking
on doors for candidates because they want
these centers of power to create,
to make different decisions.
- How much is Comedy Central going
to be involved in the process beyond step one,
beyond, you know, broadcasting or publishing
or sharing this kind of comedy content?
- Whatever issues we take on will
be in partnership with the issue organizations
that do the work.
- It's a bit like participant media,
hearing the story about Roma, the movie
about the domestic worker in Mexico.
- That is such a great example.
- Didn't just make the movie,
they also worked in close conjunction
with a Skoll awardee who is working
for and with domestic workers in the U.S.
and across the world in order
to change the whole culture and also work
in order to ensure that there are better rights
with this community.
- For domestic workers, right.
Ijen Pou spoke to us about that,
how Roma was a narrative power.
It exposed so many more people
to the issues that she and her organization
have been working to educate people on.
I think that comedy in the same way,
in smaller bits and pieces than long form.
We can't all get Alfonso Cuarón t0
to create a masterpiece.
- You can be more powerful though
because you can be part of their every day.
You can be like, I know my kids love watching comedy
on YouTube.
It's something about reaching
a whole range of people.
It's not just about going to see a movie
in a movie house or watching a big movie
on your telly.
- Film is incredibly powerful,
it can also be very serious,
in documentary film.
I think comedy is a different approach.
There are certain things that bring us together,
music, the arts.
I think we're all inclined towards laughter.
Laughter is a really easy way in
to get people to think about things differently.
- I love an interesting reading about
the research about how, I think
of comedy as something that's a bit oblique
in terms of the way our mind thinks,
but it allows us to create connections
in our brain in places that just weren't there before
and it can also give us permission
to have an emotional engagement.
It's not just intellectual.
I think that's where comedy differs
from other forms of media.
- It's a feeling.
- It enables us to change our feelings.
It enables us to create connections
and have permission, and I think often
it actually is interesting, I do a lot of work
on crossing divides, is that through laughter
we can also engage with people
who we might fear or people who come
from a different race, class, religion, crowd,
generation.
- Comedy is humanizing and it makes difficult topics,
complicated topics, more accessible.
My background is in working in the NGO
and issue space and we put out lots
of reports and do data and research
and that's important.
Not everyone, in fact very few people
are going to engage on, you know, thick documents.
People are however attuned to watching
a short video that will educate them
and make them laugh and make them think different.
- An incentive might be to laugh
and they want to watch it because it's subversive
and it's close to the bone and it's funny
and in doing so it enables them
to think about things differently.
It's a whole different way of behavior change,
but quite an effective way.
- Absolutely, comedy is a key part
of culture change.
It hasn't been employed as much
as I believe that it can be
and I think that I am just one
of the pieces and a partner on
the comedy industry side to figure out
how to find the best, funniest people
and ideas to create the content,
to reach people's hearts and minds and create change.
- Are you doing in research, for example,
on the way that people engage with comedy?
Do you put sort of, you know, like a brain,
you know, all those little, one of those hats
to see how people respond in terms
of emotional change or empathy?
- No, I know who does, so I mentioned
the Center for Media and Social Impact
at American University.
A woman named Caty Borum Chattoo,
who is on the panel later today,
where we're gonna talk about how comedy
can be not just for laughs.
I don't know if she uses what we imagine
is the sensors and probes,
but she has done that research.
- It's interesting, isn't it,
about creating empathy and allows us
to create empathy with people
we might not normally empathize with.
- It is fascinating.
Comedy narrative power, these are the ways
that we as advocates for progress
in the world should be, it's another tool
in the toolbox, but I think it's not been used
as much as some of the others.
We're here to say that's what we want to do.
We want to leverage this tool.
We want to achieve the same goals,
but use a different medium.
- That's fascinating.
Thank you so very much Erika Soto Lamb.
Coming up in 20 minutes we're gonna
be talking about innovation in agriculture.
Looking forward to see you then.