“Lame” was how one of the people that I went to the Ig Nobel awards ceremony with last night described it. I have to agree. I had always thought that the ceremony was a well choreographed, slickly produced laugh a minute kind of affair. But if last night’s performance is anything to go by, either they were having an off night or it is just never funny. The show dragged from the start when Marc Abrahams decided to thank pretty much everyone who had contributed to the show, from the Nobel Laureates to the lighting crew and the guy who had polished the floor. Not a good way to start the show. There then followed various parades, introductions and rituals (which I’m sure were funny the first year, but are lost on a new audience and have worn thin on the regulars). The parade of supporters barely got applause, whilst the “welcome, welcome” speech hardly got a titter. Things like the mini opera and the science experiments felt like filler and poorly thought out filler at that. The one saving grace was that they finished on time allowing everyone to go and watch last night’s real spectacle, the vice-presidential debate.
You Can't Beat the Feeling
Luckily, the prize winners (and I suppose the real reason most people are there) were funnier. The chemistry prize went to Sheree Umpierre for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, although the prize had to be shared with another team who showed the opposite. The biology prize went to Marie-Christine Cadiergues and colleagues who showed that fleas on dogs can jump higher than fleas on cats. The economics prize went to three researchers who discovered how the fertility cycle of a lap dancer affects her tip-earning potential. The full set of winners is here. It was a good line up, although, in my mind, none quite beat last year’s winner for pioneering research into a “gay bomb“. A difficult invention to top…
the mit atom 