A newly published survey of more than 500 science conference presentations across a two-year period set out to determine whether scientists are funny. This is itself a humorous, if not the most productive, use of time. The results were about what you would expect. Two-thirds of attempts at humor garnered either polite chuckles or straight-up dead silence. Only nine percent landed well enough to get most of the room laughing.
The biggest laughs, also unsurprisingly, came from technical snafus, like slides malfunctioning and microphones cutting out. Nothing brings an audience together faster than watching something go wrong for someone else.
Anyone who has sat through a conference on any topic knows scientists do not have a monopoly on bombing. Humor is hard to pull off in front of any audience that has not been warmed up. Even Saturday Night Live calls its opening segment a cold open, acknowledging the audience has not laughed at anything yet, which makes that first laugh the hardest one to get.
Roughly forty percent of the talks just avoided humor entirely. This is safe but probably makes for an even longer afternoon. More interesting from a scientific perspective is that it makes talks less memorable. One physician-scientist noted that despite the incredible wealth of interesting content at conferences, it can be hard to stay engaged, and by engaged, they meant awake. This perspective was shared alongside comments from one of the study’s eight co-authors.