Also, we’re going to nit-pick all your jokes and tell you why this one is stupid.
So you might as well stop trying. In a study, some critics found that biologists are duds at getting a laugh.
Everyone knows that a good joke can liven up a talk. Sadly, however, good jokes are in
short supply — at least according to a survey of more than 500 presentations at biology meetings.Two-thirds of the attempts at humour during these talks fell flat, drawing either polite chuckles or no laughter at all. Almost one-quarter of attempted jokes were judged as a “moderate success”, eliciting audible laughter from around half the audience. Only 9% prompted most or all of the attendees to laugh enthusiastically. In fairness, 42% of jests were spontaneous remarks relating to glitches in presentations, such as slide malfunctions, that were not intended to bring down the house. And audiences might not have expected jokes, making it harder to get them to laugh.
Roughly 40% of the talks monitored were humourless, eliminating the risk of failed jokes, but probably raising the risk of bored listeners. The work is published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Just biologists? OK, now I want to see some comparative studies. Who’s funnier, biologists, chemists, or physicists? What about mathematicians? Or, dare I say it, philosophers? I want to see some competition here, because my experience has been that biologists are much funnier than all those other disciplines…possibly because I don’t understand what they’re talking about. Possibly because we all know that bodily functions and sex are a much richer playground for jokes.
If you want a real snooze, listen to business people trying to make a speech. There’s usually some kind of tired old joke from a tired old joke book to break the ice, and then a lot of dreary numbers and ‘inspirational’ anecdotes.
They do provide some suggestions for adding humor.
Top tips for making jokes during a conference presentation, according to Victoria Stout, who
works in student support at Sacramento City College and is also a comedy performer.
• Authenticity is key. But if you’re super-sarcastic and mean, that’s not going to be appropriate.
• Use humour to connect with the audience, not to isolate them.
• Scientists respond well to puns. They also like analogies.
• People relax with a joke attempt. That primes the way for successful jokes later.
• Scientists have had incredibly interesting lives, and humour comes from the reality of our lived experience. Therefore, you are funny.
All that is mostly fair. “Scientists respond well to puns” sounds a little bit like an insult. “Scientists have had incredibly interesting lives” sounds like she doesn’t know very many scientists. I spend way too much time peering into dark corners looking for arthropods to be called “interesting,” and all you have to do is ask my wife or kids to learn that I am one of the most boring people on the planet.
A biologist walks into a bar.
says “ouch.”
I Googled Biologist Jokes and have to admit that the selection offered was poor. ” Biology: the only science where multiplication and division mean the same thing.” was the best in my opinion.
My only recollection from frosh chemistry (50 years ago this fall) is the prof complaining that we hadn’t laughed at a joke he’d just made. I don’t recall the intended joke; I only recall his remark that “Every academic fancies himself a standup comic”.
“Scientists respond well to puns”
sounds like an insult, but is SO SO TRUE.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world.
1) Those who won’t get this joke
2) Those who think they already have, but are wrong and
10) Those who understand ternary math.
It’s not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA
Maybe it’s the folks that show up for biology lecture that don’t have a sense of humor.
I don’t know if it was meant to be funny. but 56 years makes it memorable. A physics instructor at navy nuclear power school (that’s propulsion, not weapons)said “Intuitively casual, to the most obvious observer.”
How are octopoda like zebras?
The grouping of octopuses and spiders based on having 8 legs is a psychologically obvious thing, but it is like striped horses because that also is not an evolutionary clade.
Various species of horses have evolved stripes INDEPENDENTLY, so there is no branch of descent that cleanly separates zebras from horses. Thus, zebras are not a “thing”, just as the spider/octopus group is not a biological thing.
🤣
#7 Charles –
Yes. I remember in the late 1970s, it was extremely common to hear people at Caltech use the phrase:
Intuitively obvious to the casual observer!
So the joke you heard probably started as a genuine Spoonerism.
Of course, it might have been a spontaneous Spoonerism 20 years before that, and then the instructor kept repeating and reusing the same joke every semester until he stopped noticing that it wasn’t funny to students who didn’t know the original phrase. That’s how I always teach and re-use my jokes each semester.
🤣
Not being English or USAian I do not know the background to the spoonerism that laid the ground for the ‘intuitively obvious’ joke.
Intuitively obvious to the casual observer is straight.
Intuitively casual to the obvious observer is a spoonerism.
Puns are bad because they exclude people who aren’t fluent in the language the pun uses, but with that caveat, I think they fit very well all the criteria of a joke. Here’s one I really like:
Q: What do you call a child psychic who ran away from school?
A: A small medium at large.
It has tension when you can’t figure out how to answer the question. When you receive the answer, it takes multiple chains of logic to decode the joke: children are small humans, but medium is both a size and a conductor of information, and large is a size but ‘at large’ expresses the condition of a fugitive. Therefore, it takes work to understand the joke, and you are pleased you have solved the puzzles.
@12 moarscieenceplz
But before you get the joke you have to realize that “child psychic” means a child who is psychic, not a psychic who specializes in underage clients.
In my experience mathematicians and physicists make very clever logical-paradox jokes. Biologists don’t know how to do that and make very childish jokes.
What’s yellow, linear, normed and complete? A Bananachspace!
Wow, is someone finally doing some anthropology of science talks?
I don’t care at all about the humor or lack thereof, but I wish someone would investigate how many scientists in the audience actually understand those things. My impression from working in research was that physicists, at least, are severely underinvested in communication skills.
Says the guy who time travels to work.
And there I thought the point of lectures was to convey information.
The best guest lecturer I heard while at university wasn’t at all funny, but he was the medical examiner (forensic pathologist), his talk was absolutely fascinating.
@17 CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain
We are all time travelers, traveling through time at a pace of one second per second.
Some years ago I went to a meeting where Ernst Mayr was getting some kind of honor. He gave a talk, but it was outside on a fairly windy day and he stayed well away from the microphone. At one point he told a joke, but the only thing I know about it is the punch line, because when he got to it he leaned in to the mic and said very clearly “burlesque house”. Don’t remember if it killed, but I was amused.
Once upon a time Jack Cohen was a visiting scientist at the institute where I was a graduate student. He gave a short course on an assortment of topics related to reproductive and evolutionary biology. Many of the themes of his talks can be found in The Science of Discworld books or in The Collapse of Chaos. He was very funny. Many of his slides were Farside cartoons, and none of them had data. Unfortunately he turned out to be way too ‘handsy’ with any woman who made the mistake of standing too close to him, so he was not invited again.
A cashew, an almond and a pistachio walk into a bar.
The bartender says, “Are you guys nuts?”
…
“No,” they say, “we’re drupes.”
Finally! Botanists are the real funny ones.