SCIENCE AND CULTURE
SCIENCE AND CULTURE
Science and Culture: Serious science education, with a chuckle Amber Dance Science Writer
Global temperatures are rising. So are the oceans. Climate change has become inevitable and irreversible. To NASA climate scientist Josh Willis that sounds like the setup for a joke. “Greenland’s been on Jenny Craig,” he quipped at a public lecture in February. “It’s lost a couple trillion tons.” Willis, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, frequently gives talks on the gloom and doom of climate change. But he’s found a way to educate and inform, while making the topic palatable, using comedy. “It’s just easier to hear bad news if you can laugh about it,” he says. Willis always enjoyed comedy, but realized he could apply it to climate change communication when he was on a Caribbean cruise in 2011. An improvisation troupe was performing on the ship. He approached the director with a humble request: “I’m a climate scientist and I’m in desperate need of comedic assistance.” On that director’s advice, he enrolled in 2012 in the Second City
Conservatory program in Los Angeles. With locations in Hollywood, Chicago, and Toronto, Second City has trained many wellknown entertainers, such as Alan Alda, Tina Fey, and Catherine O’Hara. Willis studied improv and sketch comedy, learning to create characters and work in an ensemble. After earning his comedy degree—which he proudly displays next to his doctoral diploma—Willis teamed with Los Angeles
“Comedy is really about breaking things down and introducing one unknown at a time.” —Tim Lee director Rani O’Brien to produce an entertaining and educational revue for kids. They titled it The Lollygaggers because the characters—actors and puppets—inhabit a fictional, Hollywood-like place called The Lollywoods.
Climate scientist Josh Willis uses comedy to teach key science concepts to all ages. Image courtesy of Josh Willis. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509008112
In one scene, Willis plays a carbon atom looking to bond with a couple of oxygens. The two actors playing oxygen dance together as he desperately tries to cut in, garnering laughs from the young audience. Finally he tricks them, pretending to cry so they’ll hold still and he can grab them. “I’ve become carbon dioxide!” Willis shouts. “C’mon, it’s time to fly off into the atmosphere and cause global warming for a thousand years!” The play ran for four months in Los Angeles in 2014, including a performance at ClimatePalooza, a public outreach event sponsored by Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Southern California. He revived the show on August 16 at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California. Another sketch features two unlikely roommates, a polar bear and a grizzly. Displaced from their homes by ice melt and forest fires, respectively, they become an ursine “Odd Couple.” Presenting the consequence of climate change with funny characters makes it more accessible to children, says O’Brien. Willis hopes the kids head home with one song lyric, “Shrink your carbon footprint,” stuck in their heads. For his day job, Willis is project scientist for the Jason-3 mission, an ocean-gazing satellite scheduled to launch July 22, 2015. By measuring the distance from satellite to ocean surface, Willis and other scientists can calculate sea level rise. He is also principal investigator on a new NASA mission, Oceans Melting Greenland, which entails dropping sensors around the island to study ice melt from the edges of the sheet. Willis brings his comedy skills to adult audiences, too, combining serious science with jokes. “It definitely makes it more fun to give the talk. I’m pretty sure it makes it more fun to hear it too,” he says. In one bit during the Jet Propulsion Laboratory lecture, he held a flame to a water balloon to demonstrate how much heat the water in the ocean can absorb. The balloon shouldn’t pop because the heat quickly transfers through the rubber to the water; but should the people in the front row worry about getting wet? “Trust me, I’m a scientist,” Willis deadpans, as he himself dons a protective poncho.
PNAS | September 1, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 35 | 10819–10820
“I think the real advantage of comedy, for people to understand science, is that their minds are a little more relaxed when you introduce the concepts,” says another scientistturned-comedian, Tim Lee of Los Angeles. “Comedy is really about breaking things down and introducing one unknown at a time.” Willis’ more scientific talks have also benefited from his Second City skills, he says. Even if he isn’t trying to be funny with an
10820 | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509008112
audience of his peers, studying improv has made him more confident at the podium and better able to field unexpected questions. Comedy aside, improv skills can help many scientists present their work more effectively, says Valeri Lantz-Gefroh, improv coordinator for the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York. “It takes the scientist out of lecture mode and puts them into conversation with the audience,” she says.
For Willis, comedy facilitates science lessons with a serious purpose. In a Spring 2015 Second City show, he performed a song about algebraic topology to the tune of “Do-Re-Mi” (“Ball, a sphere, a twodimensional sphere; Ray, a vector on the ball. . .”). And he likes to joke that his most important contribution to the Oceans Melting Greenland project was to give it a name that allowed for an appropriate acronym: “OMG.”
Dance
SCIENCE AND CULTURE
Science and Culture: Serious science education, with a chuckle Amber Dance Science Writer
Global temperatures are rising. So are the oceans. Climate change has become inevitable and irreversible. To NASA climate scientist Josh Willis that sounds like the setup for a joke. “Greenland’s been on Jenny Craig,” he quipped at a public lecture in February. “It’s lost a couple trillion tons.” Willis, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, frequently gives talks on the gloom and doom of climate change. But he’s found a way to educate and inform, while making the topic palatable, using comedy. “It’s just easier to hear bad news if you can laugh about it,” he says. Willis always enjoyed comedy, but realized he could apply it to climate change communication when he was on a Caribbean cruise in 2011. An improvisation troupe was performing on the ship. He approached the director with a humble request: “I’m a climate scientist and I’m in desperate need of comedic assistance.” On that director’s advice, he enrolled in 2012 in the Second City
Conservatory program in Los Angeles. With locations in Hollywood, Chicago, and Toronto, Second City has trained many wellknown entertainers, such as Alan Alda, Tina Fey, and Catherine O’Hara. Willis studied improv and sketch comedy, learning to create characters and work in an ensemble. After earning his comedy degree—which he proudly displays next to his doctoral diploma—Willis teamed with Los Angeles
“Comedy is really about breaking things down and introducing one unknown at a time.” —Tim Lee director Rani O’Brien to produce an entertaining and educational revue for kids. They titled it The Lollygaggers because the characters—actors and puppets—inhabit a fictional, Hollywood-like place called The Lollywoods.
Climate scientist Josh Willis uses comedy to teach key science concepts to all ages. Image courtesy of Josh Willis. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509008112
In one scene, Willis plays a carbon atom looking to bond with a couple of oxygens. The two actors playing oxygen dance together as he desperately tries to cut in, garnering laughs from the young audience. Finally he tricks them, pretending to cry so they’ll hold still and he can grab them. “I’ve become carbon dioxide!” Willis shouts. “C’mon, it’s time to fly off into the atmosphere and cause global warming for a thousand years!” The play ran for four months in Los Angeles in 2014, including a performance at ClimatePalooza, a public outreach event sponsored by Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Southern California. He revived the show on August 16 at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California. Another sketch features two unlikely roommates, a polar bear and a grizzly. Displaced from their homes by ice melt and forest fires, respectively, they become an ursine “Odd Couple.” Presenting the consequence of climate change with funny characters makes it more accessible to children, says O’Brien. Willis hopes the kids head home with one song lyric, “Shrink your carbon footprint,” stuck in their heads. For his day job, Willis is project scientist for the Jason-3 mission, an ocean-gazing satellite scheduled to launch July 22, 2015. By measuring the distance from satellite to ocean surface, Willis and other scientists can calculate sea level rise. He is also principal investigator on a new NASA mission, Oceans Melting Greenland, which entails dropping sensors around the island to study ice melt from the edges of the sheet. Willis brings his comedy skills to adult audiences, too, combining serious science with jokes. “It definitely makes it more fun to give the talk. I’m pretty sure it makes it more fun to hear it too,” he says. In one bit during the Jet Propulsion Laboratory lecture, he held a flame to a water balloon to demonstrate how much heat the water in the ocean can absorb. The balloon shouldn’t pop because the heat quickly transfers through the rubber to the water; but should the people in the front row worry about getting wet? “Trust me, I’m a scientist,” Willis deadpans, as he himself dons a protective poncho.
PNAS | September 1, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 35 | 10819–10820
“I think the real advantage of comedy, for people to understand science, is that their minds are a little more relaxed when you introduce the concepts,” says another scientistturned-comedian, Tim Lee of Los Angeles. “Comedy is really about breaking things down and introducing one unknown at a time.” Willis’ more scientific talks have also benefited from his Second City skills, he says. Even if he isn’t trying to be funny with an
10820 | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509008112
audience of his peers, studying improv has made him more confident at the podium and better able to field unexpected questions. Comedy aside, improv skills can help many scientists present their work more effectively, says Valeri Lantz-Gefroh, improv coordinator for the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York. “It takes the scientist out of lecture mode and puts them into conversation with the audience,” she says.
For Willis, comedy facilitates science lessons with a serious purpose. In a Spring 2015 Second City show, he performed a song about algebraic topology to the tune of “Do-Re-Mi” (“Ball, a sphere, a twodimensional sphere; Ray, a vector on the ball. . .”). And he likes to joke that his most important contribution to the Oceans Melting Greenland project was to give it a name that allowed for an appropriate acronym: “OMG.”
Dance
