{"id":2196,"date":"2026-03-20T18:56:40","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T18:56:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/?p=2196"},"modified":"2026-03-20T18:56:40","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T18:56:40","slug":"why-scientists-cant-get-a-laugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/?p=2196","title":{"rendered":"Why scientists can’t get a laugh"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A newly published survey<\/a> of more than 500 science conference presentations across a two-year period set out to determine whether scientists are funny, which is itself funny, if not the most productive use of time. The results were about what you\u2019d expect: two-thirds of attempts at humor garnered either polite chuckles or straight-up dead silence, and only 9% landed well enough to get most of the room laughing. The biggest laughs, also unsurprisingly, came from technical snafus, like slides malfunctioning and mics cutting out. (Nothing brings an audience together faster than watching something go wrong for someone else.)<\/p>\n

Anyone who has sat through a conference on any topic, anywhere, knows scientists don\u2019t have a monopoly on bombing. Humor is hard to pull off in front of any audience that hasn\u2019t been warmed up. Even SNL calls its opening segment a \u201ccold open\u201d \u2014 the audience hasn\u2019t laughed at anything yet, which makes that first laugh the hardest one to get.<\/p>\n

Roughly 40% of the talks just avoided humor entirely, which is safe but probably makes for an even longer afternoon. More interesting \u2014 per science \u2014 it makes talks less memorable. \u201cDespite the incredible wealth of interesting content at conferences, it can be hard to stay engaged. And by engaged, I mean awake,\u201d one physician-scientist told Nature<\/a>, which also spoke with one of the study\u2019s eight(!) co-authors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A newly published survey of more than 500 science conference presentations across a two-year period set out to determine whether scientists are funny, which is itself funny, if not the most productive use of time. The results were about what you\u2019d expect: two-thirds of attempts at humor garnered either polite chuckles or straight-up dead silence,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2197,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[45,47,284,41,630,792,793,427,289,794,795,51,109],"tags":[788,789,790,791],"class_list":["post-2196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-ai-coding-assistant","category-ai-regulation","category-artificial-intelligence","category-biotech-health","category-in-brief","category-laughter","category-openai","category-pro-ai-pacs","category-scientists","category-study","category-tech","category-technology","tag-in-brief","tag-laughter","tag-scientists","tag-study"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}