Daing Laughing — Little Manila NYC Earth Week Comedy Night

Daing Laughing - 1080 x 1350 - 03 - Jaclyn Reyes

Daing Laughing was a community-centered comedy event that used humor as an entry point to explore the emotional weight of climate change, diasporic dislocation, and environmental precarity. Held in Little Manila NYC, the event brought together Filipino American comedians, cultural workers, and local residents to reflect on ecological and social crises through the lens of satire, storytelling, and shared laughter.

The title, Daing Laughing, played on the phrase “dying laughing” and the Filipino word daing (pronounced DAH-eeng), meaning dried fish. While daing is a beloved culinary staple, it also conjured vivid sensory images of smoke, heat, and pungency—evoking the atmospheres of overexposure, pollution, and disruption that define both climate degradation and diasporic longing.

The event featured stand-up performances and participatory moments that reflected the Filipino cultural tendency to laugh through discomfort, using humor as a form of resilience and critique. The project highlighted wordplay, absurdity, and affective storytelling as tools to surface deeper questions about community, vulnerability, and justice.

Daing Laughing marked the preliminary phase of a broader cultural organizing effort led by Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts (LMQBA). This multi-phase initiative aimed to examine climate grief, disaster justice in the Philippines, and the complex role of diasporic communities in shaping transnational responses to ecological crisis. As an early public program, the comedy night served as a creative temperature check—offering insight into community sentiment and establishing a foundation for future programming and research.

The project was co-led by Kyle Marian, a science communicator and comedian, and Ezra Undag, a graduate student in Sustainability in the Urban Environment at The City College of New York. Daing Laughing was a project of Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts (LMQBA) and was presented in partnership with Inside the Greenhouse, a climate communication initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder that supports creative, interdisciplinary approaches to environmental storytelling. Additional support was provided by Social Practice CUNY and the Radical Imagination for Racial Justice (RIRJ) initiative, which advances racial and environmental justice through arts and cultural strategies. As part of RIRJ’s Thriving Cultures program, the event was embedded in a national network of projects led by artists and organizations of color working at the intersection of narrative, justice, and collective imagination.