Did You Hear the One about the Humorless Engineer?

I once worked at a place where the technicians loved to hassle the engineering interns. One prank, in particular, involved a shaker table used for vibration tests. Interns often got the job of monitoring these events, particularly when the device being vibrated wasn't operating during the test. The shaker table sat in a room that wasn't soundproof, so the person monitoring the proceedings would be bathed in the low droning sound created by the vibrating table for the better part of an hour. The sound could easily lull you to sleep, especially just after lunch.

So mischievous technicians would wait until the intern had begun to nod off, then sneak up behind them with a small lit firecracker which would be deposited right at their feet. The ensuing explosion typically launched the intern off their chair with a wild look on their face until they noticed the technicians doubled over in laughter.

The techs could get away with these hijinks because the lab director had a sense of humor. In that regard, he might have been an exception. Engineers and scientists have a reputation for being strait-laced to a point where exhibiting a non-serious nature can sometimes stymie a career. Some of this stodginess is understandable given the grave consequences that can surround engineering developments—there's nothing funny about technologies that can end up harming people. Still, one might wonder whether there are times when those in technical disciplines might benefit from a little levity.

It turns out that researchers at the Universities of New Brunswick and New Hampshire pondered this same question. Specifically, they wanted to explore whether a humorous title on a research paper struck other researchers as inappropriate and led to fewer citations in ensuing research efforts. To check out this concept, they recruited scorers to assess the humor in the titles of 2,439 technical papers. (How would you like to have that job?) Overall, this effort sounds like mind-numbing work. The researchers report that reviewers gave only 414 of the 2,439 papers a non-zero humor score—perhaps suggesting that a firecracker-under-the-chair caper might have affected scorers the same way as engineering interns monitoring shaker tables.

You'd be disappointed if you hoped the researchers came up with something like a list of the top-ten funniest research titles. Adam Ruben, author of a monthly science humor column for Science Careers and an instructor at Johns Hopkins University, contacted the lead author of the study, looking for specifics. He was told that anonymity concerns prevented the release of individual research titles. Nevertheless, Ruben somehow guessed the top-funniest title “has something to do with passing gas, which, unbelievably, not everyone finds hilarious.” Interestingly, even the paper rated as the funniest overall was still considered by some scorers to be completely unamusing, and no paper had a consistent rating from all reviewers, Ruben reports.

But the researchers had good news for authors tempted to come up with jocular titles. They found humor in a scientific title can boost the paper's impact. Moreover, funny titles are actually over-cited, not under-cited, once other qualities such as paper importance are factored in. Researchers also say their data suggest worries about funny titles being misunderstood by those who don't share the author's cultural background are overblown. Though some readers will miss cultural references in titles (it was commonplace for scorers to differ in their detection), this doesn't seem to affect the impact of the papers. In fact, the use of cultural references was strongly associated with higher citation rates.

So, if humor in a paper title is good, would humor in the paper itself be better? The Science Careers columnist Ruben asked the study's lead author why he and his colleagues only studied humor within titles and not anywhere else in scientific articles. The answer was that the title is often the only place where humor can be found.

Ruben says this is unsurprising. “We can vigorously debate the appropriateness of a half-joke in the title, yet we’re apparently unconcerned whether the rest of the article reads as if a robot wrote it. In fact, it’s not just jokes that are largely absent from scientific papers, it’s all traces of pleasure,” he says. “Do papers need to be dry? Or could scientists maybe sneak a little variety into their writing so that the most exciting part of the article isn’t just the p-value?”

Ruben seems to have missed the fact that, at least among high school kids, the mention of a “p-value” might elicit snickers. But his larger point is that levity, which helps readers enjoy a scientific paper, may also help them understand it. What he doesn't acknowledge is that some scientists and engineers aren't particularly good at crafting humor. They are more likely to come up with groaners—like treating “p-value” as a double entendre—that would probably enhance neither enjoyment nor understanding.

All in all, if you think learning science and engineering is hard, try “learning” humor. As a riff on an old Doonesbury cartoon might go, if you don't have a sense of humor, one will be assigned to you.