Science and Comedy – Temper Before Combining?

An early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation has the android Data trying to learn about comedy.  He visits the holodeck and asks the computer for the funniest person on record.  In what was probably a meta-joke, the computer responded with a comedian that told jokes about quantum physics.  Data asked for something “less esoteric, more generic” and I see his point.

Looking at mixes of science and comedy I see a lot more misses than hits.  When I speak of misses, I mean about a combination of science and comedy.  For instances, self-styled “science comedian” Brian Malow’s bits aren’t really about science but use science for premises/set-ups or as part of the unexpected turns that prompt laughter from most of us.  Much like the edition of Get Fuzzy I posted here in July about a fight between Schrödinger’s cat and Pavlov’s dog. Take a look at current TV.  Most of the time jokes on “The Big Bang Theory” are as situational as you’d expect from a sit-com.  But typically the humor from that show, and other shows that have scientist characters (such as “Bones”) comes from the typical perception of scientific thinking – very literal, and therefore unable to parse hidden meanings, intuition or other nonverbal forms of communication (not that different from Data, really).  Malow touches on this briefly in the first bit of this video clip.

For those that really manage a mix of science and comedy, it really seems to need a high level of absurdity or surrealism.  It’s also hard to find.  Two instances I’ve seen come from a comic strip – The New Adventures of Queen Victoria.  Twice (that I’ve seen) the artist presents Barfly and Schrödinger telling jokes as a vaudeville act, and the jokes are about quantum mechanics. You can be the judge with these two strips, but they aren’t exactly knee-slappers. Clever, perhaps, but possibly too esoteric to generate belly laughs.

Am I analyzing this too much?  Do I not have the sense of humor to appreciate this?  Maybe, but it does keep me thinking.  I can’t say I agree with Schrödinger in a general sense. Sometimes I have to know how something works in order to appreciate jokes about it, and that probably is more true for science-related jokes than any others. But he might be talking more from ennui than understanding. And I am analyzing this too much.