The world’s on fire and we all know it, and we all know we’re not taking action fast enough.

I mean it’s not all specifically on fire; some of it’s flooding, or thawing, or spinning out of control. Some bits of it are actually receding, just not in a good way.

There are a lot of reasons why people aren’t taking the action that we should: the climate crisis is frightening, complicated and hard to visualise, and to those of us lucky enough to reside in the developed world, it feels like it’s a long way away.

And who has the bandwidth anyway? People all over the world are fighting for their lives in the face of exploitation or social injustice, crime, bigotry, and the sick, low-level panic that comes with the potential lack of a reviewer in the first three weeks. The climate isn’t the only important thing… but it is going to make every other issue you care about even worse.

It’s hard to make it funny, and the process has been unusually painful. If my brand new joke about ocean acidification should fail, I haven’t just learnt something useful about that joke, I’ve also made everyone feel sad. 

The show was initially intended to say, ‘Hey, you know you’re terrified of the climate crisis? Me too, but I’ve found some ways to approach it mentally and in a few cases physically, which might help you feel less scared.’

I wasn’t expecting most people’s answer to the first question to be ‘Not really, no.’  This has put me in the odd situation of feeling the need to scare people so that I can help them to feel OK again.

But is it useful to make people laugh about something so important?

Over the last 18 months, as I try to navigate talking in a funny way about a sad and upsetting thing, I’ve been the ranting climate weirdo in the corner of the comedy club. (As opposed to briefly joining a recent XR demo where I was, by contrast, effectively a cop.)

For every person who rolls their eyes at the show, two more come up to me afterwards and thank me for bothering to talk about it. Some of them look at me hungrily as if to say ‘you’re one of us now’, and I consider the possibility of accidentally whittling down my following to barefoot yoghurt-weavers and kindly older couples in North Face.

Comedy often functions as a pressure valve, where we can find some communality and laugh off our worries together, or at least come together in bullying someone for joining in wrong.

But with something as all-consuming as the climate crisis, is releasing steam actually a waste of steam? Maybe we need pressure to build up in order to create momentum for social change. Might I be doing more harm than good by letting us all off the hook for our collective and maddening apathy?

What I'm trying to do is make people feel more active and engaged, by making them feel less alone in their fear and shame. Letting audiences give voice to their eco-confessions (in a part of the show I like to think of as ‘I'm not not a feminist, but…’) gives people the chance to admit their horrible little climate secret: from spending the last heatwave sitting shower-wet in their stationary car with the air-con switched on; to pouring their disposable-cupped coffee into a reusable cup just before taking to the stage (sorry).

If those confessions release anything, I hope it's the cloying guilt that means we otherwise continue in our harmful actions; refusing to drag them into the light for fear of having to admit to ourselves that we need to change.

In the frantic reading and learning I’ve been doing to try and shore up my climate dread, I’ve realised that we don't need to solve the whole problem by ourselves, we just need to participate. When confronted with any of the most painful social justice issues of the last few years, I've often ended up calling friends at the heart of the issues and found myself pathetically asking ‘But what can I do?’. 

The answer often includes the phrase ‘We don't know either.’ What a valuable insight, to realise that everyone is struggling with these questions, and that accepting that you don’t hold all the answers can help to make you more of a participant and not less of one. I don’t have to personally invent a solution to a global problem like climate change, but by engaging with the subject and taking some kind of action I can stop being so inert and fearful.

I used to be afraid to find out more about the climate in case I made myself more scared, and then made myself go through with it and found out more, and guess what? I’m way more scared! But I’m also more hopeful.

What do we do about climate change? The answer is ‘everything’. And fortunately for us, comedy is included in that subset. The climate movement needs communicators, so dare to imagine a world in which comedy didn't just pay the bills and feed the ego, but in which it could actually do some tangible good.

• Stuart Goldsmith: Spoilers is on at Monkey Barrel at 3.20pm