‘Stand Up Science’: Steven Pinker Doesn’t Tell Jokes

Do science and comedy go together? Comedian Shane Mauss seems to think so, as did the crowd who packed the house to see Mauss’s touring comedy show “Stand Up Science” at the Laugh Boston comedy club on Feb. 27. Over the course of 90 minutes, host Shane Mauss and local comedian Ken Reid, along with local scientists Dan Everett and Harvard’s own psychology professor Steven Pinker, offered a performance that proved to be equal parts stand-up and Ted talk.

Mauss took the stage first and launched into the first stand-up routine of the night. He told stories related to his own divergent interests — comedy and science — and about how they came together to form the basis of the show. Though he has been a stand-up comedian for over fifteen years, Mauss stated that he is an avid fan of scientific inquiry. When he began emailing academics and scientists in diverse fields, he was surprised to find that they often responded to his emails. Based partially on those responses, Mauss eventually created and hosted a science podcast entitled “Here We Are.” Though he seemed to poke fun at science and scientists, it is clear that Mauss has a profound respect for the discipline.

Based on his own struggles reading academic articles, Mauss said that he is amazed that academics don’t “read a paragraph, take a nap … You’d think your brain would care about learning about itself.”

Taking a more serious tone, Mauss went on to say that the inspiration for his show came from a desire to give scientists the attention that he feels is unjustly reserved for celebrities.

“I wish scientists were our celebrities,” Mauss said.

Following Mauss’s set, the tone of the show shifted significantly as scientist Dan Everett took the stage. Though he now serves as the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University, Everett’s past work was much more research oriented: He spent thirty years studying hunter-gatherer tribes and anthropological linguistics. His talk centered around his current research on Homo Erectus and the development of human language. He discussed the presence and development of their language, their settlements, and their migration and proliferation across the globe.

Ken Reid, a local comedian, cinephile, and host of the podcast “TV Guidance Counselor,” brought the comedy back in with the second stand-up routine of the evening. Departing from the science theme, Reid’s comedy focused on the humorous aspects of his day-to-day life.

To round out the performances of the evening, Harvard’s Steven Pinker, a psychology professor who conducts research on language and cognition, took the stage. Pinker gave his presentation on the difference between common knowledge and shared knowledge. As he described it, shared knowledge is information that is known by all members of a community — while common knowledge adds that everybody knows that everyone else knows the information, too.

Although there were moments of levity in the scientific talks, Everett and Pinker left the jokes to the professionals. Similarly, the comedians left the hard science to the scientists. The evening concluded with a question and answer panel, in which all four speakers took to the stage to answer audience questions. Most questions came from the comedians on stage, who had plenty of questions for the two scientists on the nature of their work. Several audience members also asked questions — including Dean Howarth, a theoretical physicist who considers himself to be a “funny scientist.”

“Science can get heavy,” Howarth said after the show.

He said he thought that the merging of science and comedy was a great way to make complicated subjects more accessible to members of the general public. Everett echoed this sentiment when interviewed after the conclusion of the performance.

“I’ve spoken at lots of conferences,” Everett said, “and getting people interested in science in a venue where you can actually make it fun and interesting is a great idea… Getting people excited about pure science is one of the greatest privileges I think a scientist can be involved in.”

Mauss also spoke to the power of combining comedy and science.

“We’re both, scientists and comedians, trying to get to the truth of what’s going on in this world,” he said. “But I think it’s ultimately still trying just to get down to the truth of what reality is about and making observations that aren’t necessarily obvious to other people… Comedy is a tool for uncovering many of the hidden truths of our lives, and so is science.”