Red curtains on a stage stand partially open, revealing blurred out people standing behind them. Newsletter categories: infectious disease, microbiology, immunology

From jokes to puns, comedy and science make an unexpected, but engaging, match.

credit: iStock

Science comedy gets to the heart of science communication

Using comedy to talk about technical topics makes science more accessible.
Stephanie DeMarco, PhD Headshot
| 3 min read
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When I think about science, I often find myself imagining abstract images of test tubes holding colorful liquids or gigantic telescopes looking deep into the past. Serious, rigorous, and methodical are some of the words that spring to mind. But comedy? That one definitely seems like an outlier.

Recently, I had breakfast with a friend who is a talented actor and comedian when she mentioned that two of her friends had started a comedy show about science. Every month in a small theater in Hollywood, scientists get up onstage to give short talks about their research and then don a costume or two to perform a comedy sketch about their science.

In a recent show, she explained how a climate scientist used humor to explain the evidence of climate change and the urgent need for a response to it. Knowing my love of breaking down tough scientific topics and that I will happily talk about parasites to anyone who will listen, she suggested that I might have fun giving science comedy a try.

Soon enough I found myself on a video call with the two comedy writers, Ryder and Gabe. They explained how they both have a science background — Ryder in aerospace engineering and Gabe in geology — but they had recently moved to Los Angeles to pursue comedy. This show was a way to marry their interests.

Assistant editor, Stephanie DeMarco stands onstage at a Hollywood theater holding a microphone and explains a powerpoint slide with an image of sub-Saharan Africa and tsetse flies.
Stephanie DeMarco explains how African trypanosomes cause sleeping sickness onstage at Science Night Live! at the Pack Theater in Hollywood.
Credit: Ryder Tam

As I explained my PhD research on African trypanosomes, Ryder and Gabe jotted down notes, interjecting with questions here and there. Ryder asked me how trypanosomes avoid getting killed by the immune system, and I told him about the parasite’s ability to swap the main protein on its cell surface for a different one, a process called antigenic variation.

“I know what we could do with that!” Gabe said. “We could do a heist scene.” Just imagining parasites getting caught pilfering jewels from a museum and switching their disguises right before getting caught already had me giggling.

As we bounced different ideas around, I realized that comedy is a great way to communicate science. The complexity of antigenic variation can be explained with someone swapping a chef’s hat for a beret. Trypanosome social behavior can be transformed into a scene about friend groups in a high school cafeteria. How trypanosomes navigate through different tissues in their hosts can be likened to Hercules' hero’s journey in Greek Mythology.

By giving people a reason to laugh, comedy injects an extra dose of fun into science. What better emotion to correlate with science than joy? While I am by no means a comedian, the process of thinking about how I can make difficult to understand scientific concepts funny will make me a better science communicator.

When I get up onstage in a couple of weeks, I’m excited for people to have fun while learning a little more about the crazy but fascinating biology of parasites at the same time.

In the video below, Stephanie performs as Hercules confronting the three Fates, played by Joy Mamey, Gabe Valdez, and Ryder Tam, to complete his trials to become a god. Video credit: John DeMarco


About the Author

  • Stephanie DeMarco, PhD Headshot

    Stephanie joined Drug Discovery News as an Assistant Editor in 2021. She earned her PhD from the University of California Los Angeles in 2019 and has written for Discover Magazine, Quanta Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. As an assistant editor at DDN, she writes about how microbes influence health to how art can change the brain. When not writing, Stephanie enjoys tap dancing and perfecting her pasta carbonara recipe.

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Published In

September 2022
Volume 18 - Issue 9 | September 2022

September 2022

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