Tour Through Library Databases Reveals A Funny Thing About Science

About Science Science is the study of that which is odd, unusual, peculiar, suspicious, or curious. In a word: funny. Therefore, science-and scientists-cannot help being amusing, absurd, jocular, whimsical, comical, entertaining, diverting, capricious, droll. In a word: funny. Can this be documented? Yes. Anything can be documented. For this project, I teamed up with Michael Rissinger, a research librarian at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. Rissinger and I dug up, and into, some fresh mounds of data. We searched a few databases for articles and books involving the combination of science and humor. We limited our investigation to intentional humor, leaving the other sort for another day, or at least for a few paragraphs farther down the page here. We began our search with the Online Union Catalog issued by Dublin, Ohio-based Online Computer and Library Catalog (OCLC), a database of the combined catalogs of more than 6,800 libraries worldwide. It includes in excess of 31 million titles of books, journals, audiovisual materials, music scores, archives, and computer files stretching back many decades and even extending slightly into the future. (OCLC includes records for some pre-publications.) The gross breakdown of humor by specialty is revealing, if meaningless: Science/Scientists: 100 titles; Dentists/Dentistry: 43 titles; Mathematics/Mathematicians: 29 titles; Engineering/Engineers: 16 titles; Physics/Physicists: 15 titles; Biologists/Biology: 10 titles. Most of the entries for physics, it turns out, are editions or translations of Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman (New York, W.W. Norton and Co. Inc., 1985). We wondered how science stacks up against other fields. Beginning with the most colorful profession we could think of, we found the following: Accounting/Accountants: 14 titles. Accountants and accounting account for 14 titles, while biology and biologists generated only 10. That's about what you might expect, since accounting is reputed to be about a third as funny as dentistry. It was a bit shocking, though, to discover that accountants are 40 percent funnier than biologists. Much of the biological humor, however, turns out to be included in the larger world of "Science/Scientists," a category that includes very little about accounting or accountants. The overlap is mainly on the subject of inventive data manipulation. We also looked at two other nonscience fields, both of which often clothe themselves in the language of science. In contrast to science, where the humor is created by happy participants and appreciative admirers, most of the humor for these groups (let's borrow a term from cladistics and call them "outlying groups") is produced by outside observers. Law/Lawyers: 509 titles; Politicians/Politics/Political Science: 5,983 titles (not a typo). Sometimes it is difficult to tell if science humor is intentional or not. The ambiguity is evident in a random sampling from my desktop. All of the following were sent in by readers of the Annals of Improbable Research. When you run across such material, I urge you, for the sake of something or other, to send us a copy, that we might help it gain wider recognition. "Seasonal changes of circadian pattern in human rectal temperature rhythm under semi-natural conditions" (N. Maruta, T. Natsumek, H. Tokura, K. Kawakam, N. Isoda, Experientia, 43[3]:294-6, 1987). "An experimental study of the olfactory and visual modalities in the systems of communication between the child and the family dog" (J. Millot, F. Bonnin, A. Eckerlin, (Soci‚t‚ de Biologie, 187:666-77, 1993). The article is in French. "Effect of ingested sperm on fecundity in the rat" (R.A. Allardyce, Journal of Experimental Medicine, 159:1548-53, 1984). "A study of the influence of ageing [sic] on the mechanical properties of Cheddar cheese" (M.N. Charalambides, J.G. Williams, S. Chakrabarti, Journal of Materials Science, 30:3959-67, 1995). "Explosives uptake by existing vegetation and crops at Army ammunition plants" (S.D. Zellmer, J.F. Schneider, N.A. Tomczyk, W.L. Banwart, W.P. Houser, poster presented at the 1994 convention of the American Society of Agronomy). "A limited mathematical model for the fermentation of dry sausage" (B.E. Verlinden, J.A. Spriet, Journal of Food Engineering, 21:1-17, 1994). "The effects of unilateral forced nostril breathing on cognition" (M.E. Buebel, D. S. Shannahoff-Khalsa, M.R. Boyle, International Journal of Neuroscience, 57:239-49, 1991). "Impact of wet underwear on thermoregulatory responses and thermal comfort in the cold" (M.K. Bakkevig, R. Nielson, Ergonomics, 37[8]:1375-89, Aug. 1994). Those last two papers garnered Ig Nobel Prizes in 1995, in the fields of biology and public health, respectively. The richest source for such stuff, of course, is the medical literature. One example, itself a cautionary tale, will suffice to demonstrate: "Precautions when lightning strikes during the monsoon: The effect of ozone on condoms" (R.F. Baker, R.P. Sherwin, G.S. Bernstein et al., JAMA-Journal of the American Medical Association, 260[10]:1404-5, 1988). Back to our search. A check of the Biological and Agricultural Index, issued by Bronx, N.Y.-based H.W. Wilson Co., which covers about 200 journals, turned up a quantity of officially recognized science humor articles. Most were confined to a handful of journals. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, for example, has published articles ranging from "Dr. Factifuge meets the Three Stooges" to "Bacchus in the laboratory: In defense of scientific puns" to "Homer Smith, urine, and modern warfare." It is not uncommon for authors to sneak in a bit of humor here or there in an otherwise serious paper. A paper can be both important and funny, though there remain people (see the final paragraphs of this article) who believe that science and humor should not mix. These people insist on the correctness of the Chicago Manual of Style equation: I = k(L x D), where I = importance, measured in number of times the paper will be cited; L = length of the paper; D = dullness of the paper, measured in how closely it adheres to the Chicago Manual of Style; and k is a parameter of some sort. Feeling trapped by uncomfortable publishing restrictions, many researchers turn to the publication form of least resistance: graffiti. The rise of the Internet is doing serious damage to this traditional art form. Many older scientists, trained in the subtleties of felt-tip pens and permanent markers, are distraught at the decline of a noble practice. Most science humor is never published, at least not in the official literature. This is itself a curiosity, given that much of what is published in the world's 10,000 research journals eventually turns out to be wrong, or is supplanted by new interpretations that make the old ones look Rube Goldbergian. Some of the best science humor-written, oral, and/or otherwise-is saved from oblivion by noble archivists such as Betsy Devine and Joel Cohen, whose 1992 collection Absolute Zero Gravity (New York, Fireside Books) is an exemplar of the historian's art. Spoof science is a grand tradition. Rare is the scientist who has not produced it. Thiotimoline is a crystal with the unique property that it dissolves just before you add water to it. Isaac Asimov invented Thiotimoline for his first published short story, but only discovered its true power years later when defending his doctoral thesis. A stony-faced examiner suddenly asked him to explain the nature of thiotimoline. Asimov nearly panicked trying to decide whether the examiner understood that thiotimoline was a joke. As you probably know, Asimov did get his Ph.D. Sometimes the humor takes a very stange path, and becomes transformed into something useful. In 1956, Alexander Kohn-a virologist at Tel Aviv Medical School and cofounder of both the Journal of Irreproducible Results (JIR) and later the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)-concocted a treatise explaining how zippers could be used in abdominal surgery for cases in which the surgeon would have to delve into a patient several times. Years later, real surgeons, some of whose parents and grandparents had been tailors, began installing real zippers in their patients. This in turn led to the publication of serious articles such as "The abdominal zipper: A surgical surprise," by V. Martinez-Ibanez, J. Lloret, and J. Boix-Ochoa, published in the journal Cirugia Pediatrica, 5[3]:182-3, July 1992. Sometimes humor and seriousness mix in almost unimaginable ways. Also in 1956, physicist Harry Lipkin of the Weizmann Institute of Science (JIR's cofounder and later a founding editorial board member of AIR) concocted a zipper spoof called "The Schroedzipper Equation." The Shroedzipper article actually made its way into the appendices of a German physics doctoral thesis. No one is quite sure whether the thesis committee appreciated it as a joke or merely failed to read the document carefully-speculation heavily favors the latter. Finally, let's dispense with the "science is humorless" business, and quickly. The reputation comes from two things: Humorless science teachers. From 1947-1994, under a National Endowment for the Humanities grant designed to show that "the humanities are distinct from and superior to science," every middle school and high school in the United States was required to employ one "exemplary science teacher" who was cold, mechanical, and humorless. The teachers were hired, and proved to be ruthlessly efficient at their work. Edward Teller, of whom no more need be said. With those exceptions, by George, science and scientists are generally pretty funny. Marc Abrahams is editor and cofounder (with Alexander Kohn) of the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) and the Internet-based "mini-AIR." He can be reached at: AIR, P.O. Box 380853, Cambridge, Mass. 02238; (617) 491-4437. E-mail: marca@wilson.harvard.edu.

Tour Through Library Databases Reveals A Funny Thing About Science

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