An orangutan, a tackling squirrel, and 10,000 reasons to laugh at the wild

The 2026 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards drew a record field from 112 countries. Behind the belly laughs sits a serious idea, that making people smile at an animal is the first step to making them save it.

The photograph travelling the internet this week needs no caption, though it was given a good one. An orangutan, deep in a Borneo green, raises a single finger to the lens with the weary authority of a film star who has had quite enough of the paparazzi. The image, credited to Tanner Mansell and entered in this year's Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards, is the kind of thing that stops a thumb mid-scroll. You laugh first and ask questions later.

The questions, it turns out, are worth asking, because 2026 has been the funniest year on record. The competition received more than 10,000 entries from 112 countries, its largest field ever, according to Smithsonian Magazine, and the judges have cut that down to 40 finalists, with separate shortlists for photographers under sixteen, for portfolios, and for video.

A record year for the ridiculous

The finalist titles are half the fun. A squirrel in Hanover, Germany, hauling an enormous mouthful of grass, is filed as “Little Godzilla.” A second squirrel, in Santa Cruz, California, is caught mid-assault on a great horned owl many times its size, under the entirely reasonable headline “Are You Kidding Me?” A white-tailed eagle in Finland strides across the frame with such purpose that its photographer titled the shot “Fashion fades. Feather coats are forever.” In Amboseli, Kenya, an older elephant's dust bath lands squarely in the face of a calf, a moment its photographer called, simply, “Lessons.”

That wager is the whole point. The awards exist to raise money and attention for conservation, and this year's cause is the Born Free Foundation, which works to protect wild animals from exploitation. Tom Sullam, a photographer who co-founded the competition, has long argued that humor is not a distraction from that mission but the delivery system for it. A person who laughs at an animal feels a flicker of kinship with it, and kinship, not guilt, is what changes behavior (Smithsonian Magazine).

Why a good joke is a conservation strategy

There is real money behind the mischief. The overall winner, the category winners, and the highly commended images will be announced on December 8, 2026, with the top prize a photographic safari with Alex Walker's Serian in Kenya's Masai Mara, alongside Nikon camera gear. The finalists will hang at Gallery@Oxo in London from December 9 to 13, and the public can vote for its own favorite, the People's Choice, until March 1, 2027.

The Caribbean, for its part, would field a strong team. Anyone who has watched the green vervet monkeys of St. Kitts case a hotel breakfast buffet, or a Barbados blackbird mount a raid on an unattended lunch, knows the region is not short of animals with comic timing and a complete absence of shame. A Caribbean entry on that London wall feels less like a long shot than an overdue invitation.

For now, the orangutan has the last word, one finger raised to a watching world. It is a joke, and it is also, quietly, the point. We protect what we love, and we are quickest to love what makes us laugh.