People Are Sick of Plastic Straws: Is Comedy Hurting the Anti-Plastic Movement?

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They took away straws in California. They made them illegal in some states to

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serve. It's insane. And they took them away, and we were like, all right. No one

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asked for proof. No one was like, why are you doing this? And they threw away. They go,

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uh, turtles. Turtles are dying. And we just were like, oh, OK, seems reasonable. Does

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it? Where? Where are all these turtles? I'm almost 40. I've

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seen six turtles my whole life. You're telling me millions of turtles are

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That was a clip from comedian Andrew Santino's stand-up comedy

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that I came across on a YouTube short. And I have a fundamental problem with

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the way he goes about talking about how a plastic straw would

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end up in a sea turtle. Now I get it, it's a

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comedy bit, and it's supposed to be funny, and it kinda is.

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I totally get what he's saying. But as a scientist

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and as a science communicator, I worry that people take

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comedians a little too seriously and that we put a

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lot in what they say. We believe in what they say when

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they start to come out with stuff like this. And that is concerning to

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me as a scientist and a science communicator. We're going to talk about that on today's

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episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show. Hey,

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everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I

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am your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with

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Every day, Monday to Friday, I send you the latest podcast episodes,

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as well. So speakupforblue.com forward slash newsletter is where you

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go. Now today I am going to be talking about how comedy influences

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communication and messaging and how as a society

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We put a lot into our comedians these days. We expect

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them to be able to push the

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envelope a little bit in terms of political correctness, but we also have

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them tow a very fine line, and they can't cross that line. There

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are some comedians that are very out to do that shock value comedy,

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and there's others that are traditional and kind of do a little bit of a play

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on words, or people who do a lot of dad jokes. There's comedians for

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everybody out there. Now, obviously, comedy

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can go really well, and it can go really badly.

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We've seen recently in political news,

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we saw that right before the election, that

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there was a comedian that went up and spoke for Trump's rally,

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but talked about how there is an island of

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trash out there, thinking everybody's thinking, oh, the Pacific Jire, the plastic island.

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uh... but then start talking about how puerto rico is the

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insinuate the puerto rico is trash and obviously didn't

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hit well as it shouldn't have been uh... done

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on a political landscape like it was in front of pretty

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much the entire country it went viral obviously uh...

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that can be implied to get hit from a political standpoint political standpoint

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as well as just sort of like human decency standpoint uh...

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now Some people argue that if he said that in a comedy

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club people would have understood either way Didn't

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love the joke not a lot of people did But like I

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said comedy can go really badly people hired him as a comedian and

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a roasting comedian a guy who goes up and roasts other people so insults other

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people for fun and like that's what people expect of

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him and not making excuses, but that's what they hired him for.

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They just didn't do their due diligence and didn't think it would probably

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land that badly, which was awful. But

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comedians are all over the place. They can go up and they can go down, and

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sometimes they're really great, and some people have a little bit more crass

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in their humor, and some people like it, some people don't, but you

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get to go and watch whoever you want. This

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comedian that I'm talking about today, Andrew Santino, I think he's a funny

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comedian in certain aspects. Obviously, I've never, you know, nobody,

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everybody's joke, like all the jokes that a comedian puts out, not all

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of them land with certain people and others. Like I said before,

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he does a few racial jokes I'm not a huge fan of. Other

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jokes he says I like, and so I kind of go back and forth. But

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he's in my feed for my YouTube shorts, and I came across this

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one clip from one of his comedy specials. And

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I'll link to it in the show notes. This is a YouTube short that

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I found. And it was really interesting, because he's talking about how

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the plastic in a turtle doesn't add up. And he's referring to

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the plastic straw that ended up in a sea turtle's nose a

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number of years ago. This is as I am starting my podcast, I

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believe. And there was a video that went viral. And I

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actually know the people who not only filmed the video, but

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took the plastic straw out of the poor

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turtle's nose. Just a quick situation, quick

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story of what happened. So there was a research crew off the coast of

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Costa Rica, just along the coastline. They were looking at sampling and

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catching and tagging all of Ridley sea turtles. Dr.

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Christine Figgener was one of the researchers that filmed the incident.

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And Dr. Nathan Robinson was out on the boat, on the

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crew, just helping out as well as looking for information on

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his study at the time. And we had

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both of them, I've had both of Christine as well as Nathan

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a number of times on the podcast to talk about that situation. Nathan

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was the first one to come on and he talked about the whole ordeal

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and sort of he went through that ordeal. And he's in the, obviously

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the video went insanely wild and it started a

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new movement of, you know, ending single-use plastics. And

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the plastic straw became that symbol to say,

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hey, that image of a plastic straw being

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pulled out of a sea turtle's nose, and the blood

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that came out of the nose, it was pretty graphic, the blood that came out of the

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nose, and you can see how much pain that

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sea turtle was in, right? That caused

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a lot of concern. And people use that, this plastic straw, as

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a symbol for single-use plastics and how we need to

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stop using single-use plastics, how it can get into the ocean and how it can get into

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a sea turtle's body. Now, why do we care so much about sea turtles? One,

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they're an iconic species. They are found, there are

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seven species, they're found all over the world. They are

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just gorgeous when you look at them. People just love them because of

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the sheer size of them. the way they move, people love

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turtles, but also that all seven of them are

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endangered in some sort of way. And over the

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last 20 or 24 years, we've really come to understand

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how far they've traveled with GPS technology in

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the way that it is and tagging technology in the way that it is. The

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first sea turtle ever tagged, which was a friend of the podcast, may he rest

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in peace, Dr. Oh, gosh. Dr.

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Wallace J. Nichols, him and his team tagged

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a sea turtle, and they watched it go from Baja, California to

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Japan and then back, across the Pacific and

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back. That's how we realize how far

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these sea turtles travel, how important they will be in every habitat that

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they land and that they visit on the way there

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and back from their journey, and how a lot of sea turtles come back to

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where they nest. for a reason. All of

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Ridley's sea turtles off the coast of Costa Rica, they come to a

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specific Costa Rican beaches in the hundreds. And

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they come in and they lay their eggs and then they go off again. And it's

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a tourist attraction right now, an ecotourism attraction, watching all these sea

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turtles come in. And people can walk around as long

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as they don't disturb the sea turtles and they can watch all these sea turtles lay

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eggs. But it's a very delicate procedure. You don't want

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to scare off the sea turtles. You want to make sure that they come

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in. And I don't know what the regulations are around sea turtle nesting

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season for all the ridleys off the coast of Costa Rica. But

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after the incident of the sea turtle with the straw in its nose

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and taken out, four months later, Nathan contacted me.

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And he said, hey, Andrew, remember when you said if there's ever a, remember when

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you asked me what are the chances of a sea turtle having a straw in

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its nose? And I said it was like a million or two million to one because we've never seen it before.

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Well, he goes, four months later, 70 kilometers down the beach, I actually

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pulled out a plastic fork from a sea turtle,

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an olive ridley, again, in 70 kilometers south of where they

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were. So obviously, it just doesn't happen once. It happens at least twice,

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we know. But it could happen a lot more. We just don't know why. So

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Nathan put a video out saying, hey, We think there's a

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reason why, you know, as all of Ridley's sea turtles, and we haven't seen

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other sea turtles, all of Ridley's sea turtles tend to

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be a little bit more adventurous in the type of food that they eat. They

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are omnivorous, they eat shrimp, and they

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think that when a plastic fork or a plastic straw

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that is in the water column will get bent out of shape at

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some point, because it's pretty rough out in the ocean, the salt can break

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down the plastic a little bit, the sun can break down the plastic, and

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so, you know, a plastic straw that is bent

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could look like a shrimp, you know, like that hook kind of thing, as

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well as a plastic fork could look like a shrimp. The olive ridley

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sea turtle goes after it, takes a bite of it to test it out to

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see what it is, tries to swallow, can't swallow, tries to cough

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it up, realizing it's not a shrimp, and then it goes into its navel cavity

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instead of coming into its nose and it gets stuck. Now, the odds of this happening are probably

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You know, it's not very low, it's probably quite

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high, but it still happened twice within a

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span of four months, so that you could almost assume that it could happen more. Probably more

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studies need to be known, need to be done to be able to

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say that specifically, but, or with any kind of reassurance, but

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this obviously happened twice, so we know that it can happen once. So, during

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this clip, Andrew Santino talks

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about how it doesn't really add up. How they're saying,

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hey, like he said, I've only seen six sea turtles

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in my entire lifetime. I've never seen one with

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a straw up its nose. I haven't seen one. So

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why would I believe you when it says that this is a big problem?

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Right never talking about how these sea turtles are endangered and all the different things

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that are facing a climate change You know the fact that they get poached

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quite a bit like their eggs get poached quite a bit sea turtles get killed

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quite a bit for food and for tourists sort of Trinkets

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and things like that they don't talk about the fact

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that from hatchling to adult the odds

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of getting is like you know, 2 to 450 eggs

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that make it to adulthood, there's a lot going against the sea turtle. It's

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slow growing, so any kind of big movement or big pressure against

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it could really wipe out a whole generation or a whole nest in

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one. We just don't know, right? So I

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understand this is a comedy routine. I totally understand that and

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I totally understand how it's like, hey, you know what? You

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know, it's I don't see it, so why would I believe

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it? And again, this is the problem here that perpetuates the

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message that if we don't see it for ourselves, then why would

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we believe it? We believe whales get stranded because we see whales get

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stranded, but we don't always see a straw in a sea turtle's nose.

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We don't always see a fork in a sea turtle's nasal cavity. But

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it gets there. We've actually seen that on video. It

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actually gets there. So it's almost safe to assume that it

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happens more often than we think. We

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talk about how there are hundreds of thousands of animals that get killed from plastic. But

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does that mean that when scientists come out and say those numbers that people aren't

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believing it because comedians say, hey, if I don't see it with my own eyes,

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I don't believe it? He even goes into a little bit of

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a kind of like a skit where he talks about

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like, ocean, big currents there. And he talks

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about like, kind of like in a very Neanderthal kind of voice. And

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it just doesn't add up. The ocean is such a big place. How can it

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be so damaged? But again, that's the problem. It is

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damaged. Microplastics are all over the ocean

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from top to bottom. And if you see the research that's

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out there, you understand that that is always going to be

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a problem, the way that we manage and the way that we use

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single-use plastics. But here's what I'm worried about.

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When you see a comedian like this joke about it, does that

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mean that it becomes like people believe that? Like people will be like, oh

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man, if somebody talks about this, how could they even talk about it? How could

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they even think that this is a problem? You know, like Andrew Santino

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is right. Like this is a, he is a comedian. right

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and a good one at that it was a funny skit like

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if you take it for what it's worth like for what it is it's a it's a

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little bit that he did and it's funny I get it but

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my concern is that people put so much into comedians we

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listen to comedians on podcasts we see them on videos we

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watch them in specials and we see more and more of these specials coming up and they

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comment on you know, big issues and

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small issues and environmental issues. And if

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they continue to comment for that bit to be like, hey, you know

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what? Like, this could be a problem. I

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worry that the message gets manipulated. And

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people are just like, you know, sea turtles are not

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being affected by plastic straws. Why do we have to worry about

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a plastic straw? And I've heard this before. This is why I get worried about this. When

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Clubhouse was a thing, that clubhouse that was an app that you

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can get on and you can hold rooms and you can have a chat about

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a specific topic. There was a movie that came out

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that I'm not even going to name. It was a Netflix movie that had

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a lot of misinformation in it and it was supposed to get people to

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also name it, Sea Spearcy. It was a terrible documentary. It

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was a lot of misinformation but they wanted to get people to stop eating fish.

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And so I held a clubhouse, I guess, a

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talk on that discussion about why I didn't like a lot of the

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messaging that came out of CSpiracy. And people were

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coming in and attacking me for this. And I'm like, look, the problem is

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it wasn't right. If you want people to stop eating

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fish, that's fine. You can do that. But don't talk about

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misinformation, just like people are trying to misinform people about climate

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change that I talked about on Monday's episode. Don't get into

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all of that. Tell the truth. Science is science.

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That's the way it is. If you want to be an advocate, be an advocate and tell people to

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stop eating fish. There are a lot of reasons why many people can stop eating

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fish. However, most of the people in the world depend on fish

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as their protein source. So you'll never really get rid of it. That was

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the kind of topic that I was talking about. And then somehow the

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conversation got misaligned and people were talking about, yeah, plastic

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straws. I don't want to talk about plastic straws anymore. Why do we need to

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worry about plastic straws? There's the

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messaging that's a big problem. Plastic straw is like

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a gateway plastic to the rest of the single-use plastic problem.

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Right? And so having plastic straws, knowing that it affects sea

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turtles, having a video that it affects sea turtles, right? Maybe we

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don't have the scientific study that shows that it affects sea turtles on a wider range,

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but we could assume that plastic kills

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sea turtles in one way or another, whether it be a straw in its nose or

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a plastic fork in its nose, or just the fact that it accumulates plastic

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over time in microplastics. There is

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a reason. There's significant evidence out

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there to show that plastics affect a lot of species, not

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only sea turtles, but marine mammals, and fish, sharks, seabirds,

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and so forth, that will kill hundreds of thousands of animals

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in the ocean a year. So sea turtles are part of that. But

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when you have people like, I'm sick of hearing about the plastic straw. Why

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are you sick of hearing it? Is it you're just sick of hearing it because you see it everywhere and you want a

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plastic straw? Or is it because you want You're

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just done with it. You're just sick of that feeling because it's inconvenience to

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you, or you're just sick of that talk. Maybe dive deeper. Maybe as communicators,

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we need to dive deeper into it and start talking about how it is

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a gateway plastic, like a gateway drug. And that it

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is a symbol of a larger problem of single-use plastics.

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And that's really where it comes down to. But my worry in

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this episode that I want to talk about is just kind of nail it home one more time

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is that, Comedians hold a

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lot of power in today's information highway.

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If you look at a show like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and

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other comedians now, it started off with Jon Stewart. He

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covers the news and people rely a lot of

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times on him talking about the news. That's where they

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get their news from. But it is a comedy show. He's even said it himself. He

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goes, I am a comedian giving you information, and

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trying to highlight the hypocrisy of the different

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news channels out there. But he has his own opinion, and

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he has his own thoughts, and he identifies, and a lot of the

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communities that are with him on that team of Comedy Central identify

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a lot of the hypocrisy, a lot of

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the misinformation, a lot of the manipulation in

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the media, according to politics, especially when it comes to politics.

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And a lot of other shows, John Oliver's show, we had the Colbert show

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or Colbert Report back in the day. All those are

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comedy shows. They're there to highlight the comedic value, but

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also inform people of some of the stuff that goes on

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in media as well as politics. And people are well aware now on both sides,

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whatever part of the aisle you're from in politics, you understand that

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there are biases in the media. And that definitely highlights it

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from shows like The Daily Show. But

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the problem is, it is a comedy show. And a lot of the times when John

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Stewart has been debating other journalists, or so-called journalists,

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editorial journalists, who also manipulate the message that he makes

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fun of, he will say, he's

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like, look, people depend on you for the news. He's

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like, they shouldn't be depending on me for the news. I am a comedian. I

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am not the news. My show is satire. But

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over time, that has evolved into highlighting

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a lot of really interesting information that people don't

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know because they're not put in regular media, regular news

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programs or editorial programs. John Oliver Show is

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really good at highlighting things. He did a really great piece on

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deep sea mining that really highlighted information and a

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lot of the hypocrisy that goes around with certain countries vying

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for a spot and starting to mine or

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discover whether they can mine for deep

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sea, like deep sea mining sort of metals,

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right? Even though they know that it's a risk. And

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it was a great piece. And John Oliver comes up with these pieces every single one,

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every single show. So it's interesting to see how that develops. But

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again, the problem is it is a comedy show. So sometimes they say some ridiculous

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things. And depending on where you fit on that issue,

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you may like it or you may not like the stuff that he puts out, because it is biased. And

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the same thing goes back to this Andrew Santino and the sea turtle and

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the plastics where it doesn't add up. He equates.

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And I know this is a comedy, so remember that. And

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I'm not nearly as good as a comedian as Andrew Santino. He

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equates a plastic straw ending up in a sea turtle's

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nose as, you know, throwing a Q-tip up in the air and catching

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it and getting inside of his penis. Obviously

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for a comedic bit. But we know how the

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straw got into the sea turtle. The

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sea turtle tried to eat it. It doesn't know the difference. An Olive Ridley sea turtle is

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experimental in terms of what they try and bite on, because they

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think it's a shrimp, or they think it's a crab, or they think it's something floating in

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the water that could look like food. Unfortunately, it's not. It wasn't. And

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it severely hurt that sea turtle. It would eventually probably

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have killed the sea turtle if it wasn't for Chris

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Figgener and her team with Dr. Nathan Johnson and Dr. Chris Figgener,

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and to see that they were there to rescue it. That doesn't always happen. So

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we don't know how many sea turtles have died because of plastic straws

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or plastic forks or any kind of plastic that they've ingested because they've tried to

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eat it, right? And this is what

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I'm worried about. So you know how I feel about this position. I want to know how you

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feel about this position. Love to hear your thoughts on what you think

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of plastic straws as a symbol of the larger issue

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of plastic pollution. Let me know in the comments on Spotify,

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in the comments on our YouTube, if you're watching this on YouTube. And

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of course, if you want to hit me up on a DM on Instagram at

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HowToProtectTheOcean, I'd love to hear from you. So that's at HowToProtectTheOcean. Until

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next time, I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How To Protect The

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Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time