April Is High Season For Practical Jokers In Labs

Let this be a warning to bosses and pompous big shots in labs around the United States: It's that time of year again when your students and your colleagues are busy devising devilish ways to prick your balloon. What's that? This article reached you too late? April Fool! FISHING FOR LAUGHS: Jeffrey Maynes, "troublemaker-in-chief" as a postdoc at U. Alabama, turned a colleague's lab into an undersea scene. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "practical joke" as "a mischievous trick played on a person especially to cause him to feel embarrassment or indignity," and April is high season for practical jokes. But people who work in labs can be mischievous any time of the year. A good practical joke can cut through tension, enliven the day, and promote group cohesion. On the other hand, "telling jokes, particularly practical jokes, is a risky business," advises Patt Schwab, a Seattle-based consultant who specializes in the use of humor in the workplace. "I would make sure that the practical jokes I did only had happy endings." HUMOR ME: Patt Schwab, a Seattle-based consultant specializing in workplace humor, stresses that the end result of a practical joke should be one that "everyone is smiling". Buddy Ullman wasn't thinking about the date as he took the elevator to his lab at the Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland on April 1, 1991. As the elevator doors opened, the professor of biochemistry and molecular biology glanced toward his lab and was stunned by what he saw. "The lab was completely boarded up," Ullman recalls. "All the lights were out, yellow radioactive tape was on all the doors, and there was a big sign saying, 'This lab has been shut down due to radioactive safety violations.' I was utterly horrified. I was ready to cry. My career flashed before me." Inside Ullman's darkened lab, postdoc Sheri Hanson and her coworkers were trying desperately to suppress their laughter as they watched their boss suffer. They watched as he read every word of the phony notice they had posted under the letterhead of the radiation safety office, stating that a significant amount of radiation had been detected in the lab and it was thus being condemned. And they continued to watch as he walked around the corner to the lab's other door, which was similarly decorated, and read every word of that notice a second time. Then Ullman turned on his heel and began racing toward his office. "He was on his way to call the radiation lab," relates Hanson. "One graduate student thought that we had taken it far enough, and he opened the door and yelled, 'April fools!'" MELTDOWN: Buddy Ullman was fooled by a bogus radiation-safety warning posted on the doors of his lab by students and postdocs. "I was so shocked and so devastated that it was a little hard for me to laugh for a while, but I realized I was the butt of a very good joke," says Ullman. "It made me feel good that they would treat me as a human being rather than as a boss. I think [the joke] reflected group cohesion, and I think it reflected the fact that they were comfortable with me." This joke is a perfect example of well-calibrated humor, according to Schwab. "You can do the exact same thing, but if the attitude is 'We're really gonna put the screws to this guy,' the feeling is very different than if it's, 'Boy, Joe is gonna lose it. We'll have him in stitches.'" "Buddy has a great sense of humor, and we all knew that going into it, or we never would have done it," acknowledges Hanson. Even potentially hilarious practical jokes can fall flat when taken too far. This happened several years ago at the University of Georgia, Athens, in a prank whose planning was witnessed by Cindy Putnam-Evans, then a graduate student and now an assistant professor of biology at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. As Putnam-Evans relates the story, it seems there was a new graduate student in one of the labs who fancied himself a ladies' man. Moreover, he was annoyingly enthusiastic about science. Some of the women in the lab decided he was a bit too gung-ho, so they approached him one day holding an ice bucket and a test tube. They explained that they used salmon-sperm DNA in some of their experiments as a carrier molecule. That much was true. However, they continued, salmon sperm is very expensive, and for the good of the lab the men were expected to donate human sperm. The grad student meekly took the ice bucket and headed off to the bathroom to do his duty. The perpetrators had planned to stop him before he actually produced the sample, but somehow they didn't get to him in time. And when he found out that he had been the butt of a practical joke, he was mortified. "I don't think he ever found it funny," recalls Putnam-Evans. "This guy did not speak to several of the lab members for quite some time, and he eventually ended up in someone s lab." (Putnam-Evans cannot be sure the joke was the primary factor in the grad student's decision to switch labs.) "Even though some people may have felt that he deserved to be brought down, in retrospect that was a fairly cruel joke." Schwab agrees: "I think it was a fine joke all the way up to the point where he wasn't stopped." In this example, she says, "we've missed some of the elements of a good practical joke. The end of it should be that everyone is smiling." When wielded with skill, however, "practical-joke humor is a way of conveying a serious message in a nonthreatening manner," points out Robert Schleser, director of clinical psychology in the Institute of Psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. BUT SERIOUSLY: Caltech chemist Nathan Lewis conveyed a vital message via a practical joke. This is exactly what happened some years ago in the lab of Harry Gray, the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. As a Caltech undergraduate, Nathan S. Lewis, now a professor of chemistry at Caltech, was doing experiments in Gray's lab with a grad student, but a third person (whom we'll call Fred) had the habit of examining their data and rushing to Gray with an interpretation. Lewis decided to hoist Fred on his own petard. "I manufactured an NMR spectrum that was a terrific result," recalls Lewis with glee. "We left it out as bait. [Fred] took it and wrote up a paper on how important this result was. He was ready to go right to JACS [the Journal of American Chemical Society]. He had bitten hook, line, and sinker on the manufactured piece of data. We didn't let him mail it, but we let him gloat around for a couple of days. This stopped him temporarily from taking our data and interpreting it before making sure it was right." "Humor has two functions," explains Schleser. "One is the absolutely wonderful function of silliness, where there's no real harm to the people that are engaged in it." The other is typified by the proverbial slip on the banana peel, Schleser says: "If you see someone on crutches slip on a banana peel, that's not funny. If you see somebody who's really pompous and well-off slip on a banana peel, that's hilarious." 'AGAR-EATING CONTEST': Instructor Michael Winfrey, right, masterminded the silliness at a picnic for biology faculty taking his intensive summer course. The "agar" was actually Jell-O, eaten from petri dishes. Both types of humor were in evidence during an intensive summer course for biology faculty called "Incorporation of Molecular Biology into the Undergraduate Curriculum," taught by two faculty members at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse-Michael Winfrey, a professor of microbiology, and Marc Rott, an associate professor of microbiology. The silliness was in evidence during the "agar-eating contest" at the course picnic. Picture biologists with national reputations gobbling "agar" (actually Jell-O) from petri dishes. Winfrey and Rott also play a practical joke every year on one pair of students. They pick the pair who seem to have the best sense of humor and give them a phony list of instructions for a complex plasmid DNA preparation. The instructions seem believable at first, if somewhat odd. For example, they're told to dissolve a precipitate by "continuous gentle tapping" for 15 to 20 minutes. But they're also instructed to "remove gelatinous gooey goober globs in each tube with a sterile toothpick," and later to add two volumes of ice-cold Bacardi 151 rum and to incubate those "goober globs" in their noses for 15 minutes. By then they realize they've been had. Almost everyone reacts good-naturedly to being fooled, but last summer one of the victims did not find it amusing. "I have a theory that there are three types of people who have trouble with humor," says Patt Schwab. "The first type is the person who was abused with humor as a child, with teasing or sarcasm. They don't trust humor. The second is the type that really needs a lot of control, and you can't control laughing people." And the third type is "the people who are so burned out in the job that they can't imagine enjoying it." Schwab thinks the best kind of workplace humor is situational, the type that "you just had to be there" to enjoy. "I think that kind of humor gels a group together." This is the type Jeffrey Mayne excels in. Now an assistant professor of biology at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, Mayne was the official "troublemaker-in-chief" in an increasingly elaborate series of lab decorations while a postdoc at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. "It was dangerous to go away to a meeting," recalls Mayne. One time, all of the missing person's belongings were moved out of the lab. Another time a miniature croquet course was constructed between a desk and the fume hood. One postdoc, who had the habit of doodling during boring seminars, found those doodles framed and hung-complete with price tags. But the most elaborate prank was played on a fellow who earned the nickname Catfish Eddie because he had previously worked on fish viruses. "We turned his lab into an underwater scene complete with a silver-foil-covered hull of a boat hanging from the ceiling, beer cans hanging down, live catfish in a tank, a treasure chest, and a scuba diver." All this took an enormous amount of work and probably hurt productivity, at least in the short run, says Mayne. But in the long run it might have helped. "It worked for cohesion," Mayne comments. "It made the lab work better as a unit. It was only because we had a real easygoing, wonderful PI [principal investigator] that we got away with some of this stuff." In comparison, another lab Mayne was familiar with "was sort of oppressive. The boss ran everything. And there . . . people would get in and out as fast as they could. Whereas in ours, we weren't as productive between 9 and 5, but there were a lot more people there evenings and weekends. It was a fun place to be, so you didn't worry about being there a long time." Robert Finn, a freelance science writer based in Long Beach, Calif., is online at finn@nasw.org.

April Is High Season For Practical Jokers In Labs

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	FISHING FOR LAUGHS: Jeffrey Maynes, "troublemaker-in-chief" as a postdoc at U. Alabama, turned a colleague's lab into an undersea scene.