Dear Duluth newbies in search of climate security: Can you pronounce ‘sauna’ and politely decline a zipper merge?

DULUTH — Climate change isn’t a well-trod comedy prompt, but a trio of writers have taken this city’s designation as a climate refuge and are turning it into a comedic web series that considers what happens when the van-loads of people get here.

How will they fit in? What happens when they experience the actual weather? Will they know how to pronounce “sauna” and to never engage in a zipper merge?

There’s a class for that. These Duluth-y lessons are at the heart of “The Duluth Climate Refugee Committee,” an “Office”-esque take on those escaping Earth’s wildfires and massive ice melts by settling near Lake Superior — an area some scientists have billed as climate proof. The series, written by Victoria Main, Paul Byrne and Jean Sramek, likely will begin filming this summer and could be ready for streaming on YouTube as soon as the fall.

The series is in response to a 2023 story in the New York Times that centered on the city as a destination for the hundreds of new residents “coming from California, Colorado and New Mexico and changing the face of this erstwhile manufacturing town on the western edge of Lake Superior.” The story tickled the local writers, mainstays in the theater scene, to consider the social ramifications.

“All I could think about when I read the article was, ‘Oh my god, do they know what the climate is like here? Are we going to tell them to truth?’” Main said.

They began brainstorming, then writing about polar fleece, the housing market and driving on hills.

“We began building this whole world,” Sramek said. “Not everyone would be accepted. We didn’t want to be exclusionary, so there should be classes people could take.”

The creators recently held auditions for a handful of regular characters on the series, including a sarcastic snowplow driver, an arty-hippie transplant from Minneapolis, a meteorologist, a city booster, and a retired mail carrier who finds the new crop of postal employees weak — both emotionally and physically.

For years, this city’s climate-proof status — based largely on its proximity to Lake Superior, a major source of freshwater — has been bandied about. A 2021 opinion piece that ran as part of CNN’s series “Let’s Talk About the Climate Apocalypse” referenced work by Jesse Keenan, a professor at Tulane University, who considered Duluth’s cost of living, vulnerability to climate disasters and effects, housing, natural resources and more and found Duluth to be one of the most “climate-friendly places in the United States.”

It even fared well in the “cool factor” category as a place that is “progressive, inclusive and welcoming.”

Even then, Sramek took the bait. She wrote her own satirical opinion piece for the local newspaper welcoming climate refugees and offering a tutorial on the population of “extroverted introverts,” endless grassroots efforts to restore old buildings, and manatee attacks.

The Daily Show, too, used it as a comedy prompt in a sketch that aired in February on Comedy Central. Michael Kosta, shivering, under-layered and mispronouncing “Duluth,” asked the city’s sustainability officer Mindy Granley: “You mean to tell me people are moving here from the good states?” This was before bumbling his way through this region’s winter retreats — snow shoeing and saunas — then mistaking deer for giant rats.

Byrne returned to his hometown a few years ago after living in a handful of places in the United States including Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. Now he’s back among the actors and writers he came of age with at the Duluth Playhouse. This resettling is a reminder of what he already knew about this place.

“We are a special breed of people, and that’s one of the reasons we love it here,” he said. “We love Duluth, and it’s not about making fun of it, it’s about celebrating people here and how much fun we have being funny.”