Laughing to love science: contextualizing science comedy

Abstract

Abstract Over the last fifteen years, there has been growing interest in the use of comedy within science communication. This paper seeks to contextualize the emergence of science comedy, analyzing the construction of comedy within academic literature as a means for bolstering the cultural authority of science. Drawing specifically from Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on power and language, academic constructions of science comedy might be read as an orchestrated moment of carnival, with humor imagined as a means for engineering public support for science, on the premise that science communicators alone should determine what version of science the public receive. However, results from a pilot study interviewing London-based science comedians suggests that such ambitions are not shared by performers. Performers framed the value of science comedy lying predominantly in the opportunity to challenge other science communicators’ own attitudes to science. Framing scientists and science communicators as science comedy’s most relevant audience, rather than the public, performers envisaged comedy as a space in which the unspoken assumptions of science could be exposed and negotiated.