Marc Abrahams: How the Ig Nobel Prize was founded

In this edition of Titans of Science, Chris Smith chats with co-founder of Annals of Improbable Research, and the master of ceremonies for the Ig Nobel prize, Marc Abrahams…

Chris - How does a Harvard mathematician turn into the person who conceives of, launches, and hosts the Ig Nobel Prizes? You've gone via software development. So what were you doing?

Marc - Since I was a little kid, I liked writing stories and writing about anything and writing about science and just, I liked writing stuff, trying to explain stuff to myself or to anybody else and, and trying to make it funny because I just like that. And I had a whole bunch of stuff that I had shown only to friends. So about 1990, I started to wonder what would happen if I took something that I wrote some of this stuff piling up. What would happen if I tried to get it published somewhere? Because I've never tried. So I sent it off to a magazine. I didn't even know where to send it, so I asked around and somebody pointed me toward a magazine that they said was probably long dead, a thing called the Journal of Irreproducible Results, which I'd never seen. I found an address. So I mailed off some stuff I wrote and a few weeks later got a phone call from a man who said, 'hello, I'm the publisher of the journal. I got your articles. Would you be the editor of the journal?' So that was how I started being in the world of writing about science and learning more about science so I could try to explain it to other people and try to make it funny. And during the first few months of that, I was suddenly meeting lots of scientists, lots of people who had invented things, lots of people who'd done odd things that were hard to describe. And I kept thinking, you know, some of these people should really be famous. The world should come to appreciate them for some because they did great things. Some because they did really horrible things, but they're all kind of funny and thought provoking. And most of these people are going to live their whole lives and they'll die and almost nobody will know what they did. And that's wrong. Somebody should do something. And then I thought, well hey, you know, I'm the editor of a magazine, <laugh>, it's a little magazine, but we can do something. And so we started the prizes.

Chris - Did you go after the possible sources? Did you use your instincts and say, right, I'm going to go and find some things that would work?

Marc - Well by then, these were the kinds of things that I was already collecting and other people were sending to me for the magazine. So I had a big source of this stuff already. And that was starting to become kind of popular. So lots of people were sending things in.

Chris - Just for the avoidance of doubt. These are real scientific studies.

Marc - Oh yeah. When we started that very first year, we didn't quite know what we were doing. Mostly did. We gave 10 prizes. That seemed like a good number. And two or three of them were fictional because I kind of thought a mix would be very interesting. But it became immediately clear at the ceremony that first year that it was a real thing, that's funny. Next to an invented thing that's also really funny. The invented thing is going to die of shame. It cannot compete. The reality is what makes the thing really funny and really gets you to think about it. And we're trying to describe each of these things we give a prize to in a way that anybody in the world could hear a one sentence description about this. And they will immediately understand the story and start laughing. Not because we twisted it, just because we told the story really clearly.