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On this day in vegan history · March 19, 2017

Carnage Imagines a Vegan Future to Get You Laughing

Simon Amstell skipped the lecture and built a mockumentary set fifty years from now, where the last carnists sit in support circles trying to explain why they used to eat their friends.

Carnage Imagines a Vegan Future to Get You Laughing
Wikimedia Commons / Simon Amstell

The facts

Release
19 March 2017, BBC iPlayer
Director and writer
Simon Amstell
Running time
65 minutes
Setting
A vegan Britain in the year 2067, looking back at meat-eating history

On 19 March 2017, comedian Simon Amstell's film "Carnage" premiered on BBC iPlayer. Set in a future where all of society has gone vegan, it looks back at the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the way we now look back at other atrocities: with disbelief that anyone thought it was normal. Amstell wrote and directed the 65-minute piece, blending real archive footage with invented future scenes and using deadpan mock-documentary narration instead of argument. The premise did the persuading: if you can imagine a world that finds meat-eating grotesque, you have to ask why today's world doesn't.

In their words

The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.

  1. the world's first vegan comedy that's actually funny

    Max Benwell, The Independent, quoted in the film's Wikipedia entry

    Source: Wikipedia

  2. Set in a utopian 2067 when all of society is vegan, the mockumentary looks back at a time when humans ate other animals

    Steve Bennett, review for Chortle, 19 March 2017

    Source: Chortle

Why it still matters

Carnage didn't ask viewers to feel guilty, it asked them to imagine looking back at themselves with the same horror later generations might feel. That reframing, comedy over guilt, became a template other vegan media would keep borrowing.

See it in the 2013-now timeline

Sources

This history is still being written.

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