By their very nature, experts don't find humour funny. We take things way too literally. That might explain why so many people, like psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and others, have worked so hard to describe and understand it. We might just be looking for the joke or the reason the chicken crossed the road. It's safe to say that we still don't fully understand what makes a joke or situation funny, even after decades of research. Several theories have tried to explain why we find humour in other people's bad luck, in showing feelings that we normally wouldn't, in putting ideas that don't go together, and in realising that our expectations have been broken. One theory says that people find laughter when they realise that both the limits of normalcy have been crossed and that the crossing is harmless.

Basically, laughter may have evolved to bring people together, but this leaves many scientists scratching their heads. Even though scientists haven't been able to understand humour, they are still trying to be funny. Scientists are always failing, as anyone who has heard me mess up a joke can attest. But what's even worse than failing? Well, experts have been the target of dishonest jokers. Many of the pranks that have been called "science's best" over the years (below) were made by the media, not scientists. Given how bad journalism is today, it may not be a big surprise that they are ready to trick people.

Atmospheric energy April 1, 1923: The German newspaper Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported how a Russian scientist had determined how to harness "the latent energy of the atmosphere." The newspaper reported how this breakthrough would allow the Soviets to launch objects "of any weight almost unlimited distances," but had promised only to use it for peaceful purposes.

The New York Times ran a front-page story on the technology on April 3, not realizing it had been a joke. Smell-O-vision April 1, 1960: Professor Hans Laube reported that he had invented a system known as "Smell-O-Vision," intended to release odours during a movie. On April Fools' Day in 1965, BBC TV aired an interview with Laube where he demonstrated the technology by chopping onions and brewing a cup of coffee. In what might be perceived as a sad premonition of the BBCs power to mislead the masses, The London Times newspaper reported how people watching at home called in to the show to report they had smelled the odours.

Combining Gravity April 1, 1976: BBC Radio 2 astronomer Patrick Moore announced an impending, once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event. I actually remember Moore describing how the planet Pluto would pass directly behind Jupiter, and at that moment the gravitational alignment would counteract and thus lessen the pull of Earth's gravity. Moore told listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment of this planetary alignment, they would experience a strange floating sensation. At 9:48, callers flooded the lines of BBC Radio with stories of unnatural buoyancy.

Shark attack! April 1, 1981: The News-Herald, Michigan, printed a hoax story claiming that scientists were planning an experiment on the breeding of freshwater sharks. Scientists supposedly planned to release 2,000 blue sharks, hammerheads and great white sharks into three lakes in northern Michigan. The article quoted a "National Biological Foundation representative" as saying, "We can't be responsible for people if they are attacked. Besides, anyone foolish enough to believe all this deserves to be eaten."

Return of the mammoth April 1, 1984: MIT's Technology Review magazine published a story called "Retro-breeding the Woolly Mammoth," describing how scientists had succeeded in bringing the long-extinct creature back to life. They had allegedly inserted DNA from frozen Siberian woolly mammoths into elephant cells and brought embryos to term in a female elephant. In a fickle twist of fate, science has since mimicked art, with a biologist at Harvard University currently attempting to do just that, as part of an effort to bring back long-gone species — a process known as de-extinction.

Let Bigons be bygones April 1, 1996: Discover Magazine reported that physicists had discovered a new fundamental particle: the bigon, which was the size of a bowling ball. It was claimed that researchers found the particle by accident, when a computer connected to one of their vacuum-tube experiments exploded. The researchers videoed their experiments and a black bowling-ball-size object was seen hovering above the wreckage of the computer in one of the video frame that was gone in the next (horror). Despite absurd claims that the big one might be responsible for a host of unexplained phenomena such as ball lightning, sinking souffles, and spontaneous human combustion, and despite the April 1 publication date, the fake story generated a huge response from readers.

Rounding pi April 1, 1998: Mark Boslough wrote a hoax article posted to the newsgroup talk.origins and published in the New Mexicans for Science and Reason’s newsletter, claiming that Alabama's state legislature had decided to round down the value of pi. Of course, pi would not be pi if truncated; it is an irrational number, meaning that it goes on forever with no repeating sequences.

Smarter science

Am I the only one left feeling somewhat disappointed with a media desperate to hide rather pedestrian attempts at humour behind the public’s preparedness to believe in the ability of scientists to solve almost any problem?

Scientists themselves are not without humour, and it feels that practitioners of scientific humour are more cerebral than journalists, preferring to laugh with you than at you. It seems that particle physicists are a rather comical bunch (as I am sure devotees of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ might agree), For example, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), home of the particle smasher used to discover the Higgs boson particle, has a track record of hoaxes, including the ‘Humpty Dumpty’ particle (2018), space elevators (2021) and the discover of an ancient particle accelerator on Mars (2017). In part, the regularity of CERNs contributions to the seasonal hoax-fest becomes part of the joke, as they compete to out-do the previous year’s efforts. My personal favourite was the 2015 confirmation of the existence of ‘the Force’ — the supernatural power from Star Wars. "Very impressive, this result is," a statement from CERN quotes "a diminutive green spokesperson for the laboratory" as saying [1].

The medical literature is not without humour. Though the protracted nature of editorial proprietary and peer review, something journalism should seriously consider, serves to deter all but the most committed comic. Thanks to The British Medical Journal, the season to be jolly has effectively replaced April 1 following the adoption of its, now infamous, ‘Christmas issue,’ where the pages of the normally scientifically sober, 170+ year-old magazine are filled with articles that cause you to raise an eyebrow or even laugh out loud. Amusing past considerations include the cheekily entitled “Sniffing out significant ‘Pee Values’: genome-wide association study of asparagus anosmia.” Other past favourites include the analysis of the hereditary of magic among the characters of Harry Potter, a description of the possible corpuscular circulation within Rudolph’s famed nose, and “Sex, aggression and humour: responses to unicycling.”

Although a welcome break from the typically no-nonsense scientific reporting style, the inclusion of such frivolity within literature has been criticised. A study published in Science and Engineering Ethics, for example, questioned the “ethics of ironic science [2].” It focused on a tongue-in-cheek report from the 2001 Christmas issue of BMJ that looked at whether praying for people with a blood infection years after they were in the hospital for it had any effect on how long their hospitalisation had been [3]. The “study” noted that even 4–10 years after an illness prayer led to a shorter hospital stays and fever duration. While the paper was clearly meant to be a joke, it had unexpected repercussions in the literature: 8 years after its publication, the article was cited unironically in a study collecting data on the effects of intercessory prayer. As the authors of the 2015 article concluded, “Publishing ironic science in a research journal can lead to the same troubles posed by retracted research,”— namely, that the publications enter research databases without any context to underline their ironic nature. You start to see where the reputation for scientists being killjoys come from.

References

1. April Fool’s Day: CERN accelerating science https://home.cern/tags/aprilfools-day
2. Ronagh, M., Souder, L. The Ethics of Ironic Science in Its Search for Spoof. Sci Eng Ethics21, 1537–1549 (2015).
3. Leibovici L. Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: randomised controlled trial. BMJ. 2001 Dec 22-29;323(7327):1450-1.