Can the Policy Community Make Fun of Itself?
Scientists take humor seriously, while policy wonks play it safe
In light of the challenging news we've encountered this week, I wanted to offer a bit of a reprieve. This post is meant to be a distraction of sorts, exploring the lighter side of the policy world through the lens of public humor.
I came across a wonderful gem while doing research for my most recent piece on tech hype.
A hero at the New York Times unearthed and saved for posterity a hilarious satirical piece on nanotechnology written by Jim Cser while he was a graduate student in the late 90s. "Nanometer-Scale Kitchen Appliances and the Physical Limits of Toastability," humorously critiques the building hype and grandiose visions around nanotech by proposing the creation of the world’s smallest toaster. Through observations, such as the conceptual difficulties of toasting at the nano-scale and the tongue-in-cheek notion of the physics of fundamental "toast particles" or "croutons," Cser delivers the funniest and most insightful commentary on early nanotech hype. By making a small tweak to the contemporary discourse that leads to an absurd outcome, Cser successfully leads the reader to reflect on the discourse itself.
Part of the power of the piece is that Cser is not some cynical external critic, he is writing from the inside — a nanotech researcher light-heartedly critiquing the excesses of his field.
These kinds of in-jokes are also a coping mechanism and source of shared experience in a world that can often be isolating and thankless — many junior scientists labor for years in dimly-lit basement laboratories facing meager pay, vanishing academic job prospects, and the somewhat dispiriting end-goal of publishing your results in a journal article that few people are likely to read. This is great fodder for humorous commiseration. Scientist-turned-cartoonist Jorge Cham amassed a cult following among fellow graduate students in the 2000s and 2010s through his PhD Comics series that both perfectly captured and made light of the many frustrations and indignities of being a lowly PhD researcher.
There is also a recognition in the scientific community of the thin line between the absurd and the inspired. Cser’s piece was published in the “Annals of Improbable Research,” a scientific publication focused on “research that makes people laugh, then think.” This group is also responsible for the Ig Nobel Prize, which has been recognizing comical and unusual scientific achievements for over three decades. Awardees at the 2023 prize ceremony included researchers who explained the very sensible basis for why geologists lick rocks, inventors of a toilet that detects illness by analyzing your excretions, and engineers exploring “necrorobotics” by reanimating dead spiders to create surprisingly strong gripping tools. These are all brilliant scientists doing impressive work. Andre Geim, who won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 for levitating a frog using its intrinsic magnetic field, went on to win an actual Nobel Prize in physics in 2010.
It’s not just scientists who find science-based humor appealing. A surprising number of scientist-comedians have gained mainstream popularity, such as Bill Nye, Dara Ó Briain, Helen Keen, and many others.
My career has spanned both science and policy, but I haven’t yet come across a similar culture of humor and comedy within the policy world. There is of course a lot of comedic content covering policy and politics — this includes all the late night shows (The Daily Show et al.), TV comedies such as Veep and Yes Minister, countless viral political memes on social media, and even Joseph Heller’s groundbreaking novel Catch-22. But these mostly have an ‘us versus them’ dynamic baked in, inviting the audience to laugh at hapless politicians, their advisors and the dysfunctional institutions they oversee from a safe distance, rather than the ‘for us and by us’ insider quality of a lot of science humor.
Lots of policy insiders have delivered scathing critiques of the policy world from the inside looking in (examples relevant to the international development world include Moyo’s Dead Aid, Giridharadas’ Winners Take All, Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden). But humor as a structured medium for light-hearted illumination and critique from within the policy community is less common — where are our own policy-comedians and satirical “Annals of Improbable Policy Research and Practice?”
I suppose it would be hard for policy folks to pull this kind of humor off because we take ourselves too seriously. And who can blame us, we are trying to solve big problems in society with huge implications for the everyday lives of real people in the real world — how our kids get educated, how to create equitable and affordable healthcare systems, how to pull billions out of desperate poverty. It is clearly hard to make light of these topics.
And perhaps scientists’ ability to poke fun at themselves is a measure of the confidence they have in an approach that has delivered over four hundred years of world changing insights, enjoying broad based respect and recognition in the light of which self-deprecating humor is all in good fun. Could it be that the more po-faced policy community are covering up an insecurity about their impact and relevance?
And yet, one of the most important satires in the English language, “A Modest Proposal,” is a prime example of a policy insider (clergyman and thinker Jonathan Swift) using dark humor and faux empirical analysis to illuminate and critique the severe socio-economic policies and injustices of 18th-century Ireland. I’m doubtful if contemporary policy wonks could pull off proposing eating children as a satirical anti-poverty policy solution, and we seem to have lost the knack for absurdist humor somewhere along the way.
My good friend and talented physicist-comedian, Jessamyn Fairfield, once roped me into doing my first ever stand up comedy set for Bright Club — a science variety show that she runs in Ireland. I started off hot with content about Barack Obama and from my time working in science, but the tone shifted markedly when I switched to my work in the policy and non-profit sector. This is the point when I became truly earnest, and spoke from the heart about the importance of this work.
Can policy wonks learn to make fun of ourselves and our work? Do we need to? Why or why not?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions. And do point me in the direction of any policy humor hotspots that I may have missed and I’ll be sure to highlight in a future post.
Hit the nail on the head.