Is the Defendant a Crime?

The culprit is not only a person, that's right? So for example, we can say that the wild fires that we've been seeing recently, they've been caused by heat waves. Now, culprit, crime, its all sounds very er formal. Is it formal always? Well, it is and it isn't. It kind of depends on the context, like so many of these things. But we can also use it for not so serious situations, more informal, yes? And it's used as a kind of exaggeration to make it kind of funny, saying that something someone is the culprit when it's not that serious.