Karl Kruszelnicki is a physicist and the Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at the University of Sydney. Adam Spencer is a mathematician and stand-up comic, and hosts the breakfast show on Triple J, Australia’s national pop radio session. As the Sleek Geeks, they have toured Australia several times, “presenting complicated scientific concepts in a fun way”, such as how to barbecue a steak in three seconds using liquid oxygen. Comedy, they say, is a painless way to increase people’s knowledge.
How did you two meet?
KK: I started doing performances at the University of Sydney and I kept hearing Adam making maths funny on the radio, so I offered him 50 dollars to come along and partner me. Luckily Adam performed so well that I dropped his hourly rate to zero and ever since then we’ve been doing famously well.
AS: I thought the 50 dollars was for the first show but it was actually a lifetime contract appearance fee.
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KK: It was like the contract you agree when you open new software. “By appearing on the show, you agree to give us your first-born child’s income.”
AS: After a year of doing the occasional lunchtime lecture in the main physics theatre at Sydney University, when we’d get about 400 students turning up each time, we decided to take the show on the road. We’ve just done an 11-city tour of Australia which was full to capacity every night. Seems we’ve tapped a rich vein that stimulates people.
What sort of people come to the shows?
KK: Not science geeks! They’re people who have a sense of curiosity about the world. We did one gig in Broome…
´ˇł§:… which is in the far north of Western Australia.
KK: It was an outdoor gig. We tied the screen to some coconut palms. And we had 400 people out of a population of 10,000. Adam, what percentage is that?
AS: One in 25, that’s 4 per cent of the population. The best thing about being on stage is when you look down and see a 12-year-old boy, his 14-year-old sister, their parents and their grandma, and you don’t know which of those five convinced the other four to come.
KK: At Broome we had two blokes drive 1000 kilometres to see us. In Perth, which is the world’s most remote city, we had three generations of the same family drive 450 kilometres from Geraldton to see us.
So you are a huge hit in Australia. Do you think you can pull off the same trick in Britain or the US?
KK: It will take time. Britain and the US are completely different markets. But it’s not impossible.
AS: The basis of what you’re tapping into – innate human curiosity – exists everywhere, so there is no reason why it couldn’t work.
How do the British and Australian audiences differ?
AS: It’s hard for us to judge how it’s working culturally because Karl in particular is so much better known to our Australian audiences. But so far, the British audiences are laughing in all the right places.
KK: Their humour is very similar. I think England is almost our natural home. America is different.
In what way?
KK: Well, for example, if you were to say, “Our Solar System is four-and-a-half billion years old, or 5000 years old if you are a fundamentalist Christian,” you wouldn’t get a laugh in Texas. Half the science teachers there believe that dinosaurs and humans co-existed.
I can see how that would be a problem for your show…
AS: I would think that if you were from one of those three countries and you had to try to make people laugh in the other two, Australians would probably be closest to the mid point. The Australian sense of humour communicates itself more easily to British and American audiences. There aren’t many pretensions to it, or built-in enforcements of the culture. It’s very laid back and very universal.
Why do you do the shows?
KK: It’s for fun and, secretly, it’s a good cause. When we’re doing Mike the Headless Chicken sketch – which describes how a chicken survived for 18 months after it’s head had been cut off – what we are really saying is, “Hey, it’s about time you learned some neuroanatomy and neurophysiology.” But we don’t put it that way. We have some fun and then sneak in a bit of knowledge.
Do you have a mission to explain?
KK: I think my mission is to be a storyteller. People used to survive perfectly well by going from village to village telling stories, and getting put up for the night. We are the modern version of that. We’re itinerant storytellers.
AS: I also do it for the groupies.
You get good groupies?
AS: I do pure maths stand-up comedy shows as well, and maths groupies are definitely the best. Then come your general science groupies, then your rock and roll groupies.
The maths groupies are the best?
AS: Oh yes. They’re into polynomials. They laugh when you say the word “roots”. They’re complex, all that sort of stuff.
KK: But he’s only really interested if their phone numbers are unique primes that he hasn’t seen before.
AS: I did a maths comedy show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival last year. On the second night, I saw a guy in the audience who’d been there the previous night. He’d come back with a girl, on a date. As I was halfway through these mathematics problems he was leaning across telling her the answers. I thought, if I help one bloke get a girl, I have done well.
But why use comedy?
KK: Because it works!
AS: Yes, no one would ever hear a story and say that was alright, but maybe you should make it less funny.
KK: Or make it a bit longer and put in some more boring stuff.
AS: Comedy engages people. It makes the time pass more quickly. If you give an 80-minute lecture where people don’t laugh, that’s like a slow painful death with a rusty fork. But when our shows succeed, people don’t realise how much time has passed. And it’s a challenge for anyone who does comedy to take something like the story of how a boy scout built a nuclear device in his own backyard and make it funny.
Why did you get into comedy in thefirst place?
AS: Well I was always a natural smart-arse. I did a lot of debating at high school and university, and I found you could deflate a very pompous person by just taking the piss out of them. And when I was doing my PhD in maths my girlfriend at the time enrolled me in a stand-up comedy competition run by Triple J, which I won. Then I started doing stuff on the radio. I did a show about the mathematics of the weather. For example: Melbourne, foggy and 16 degrees. Sixteen, that’s two to the power of four or four to the power of two, the only number where x to the power y is the same as y to the power x.
Did it have them rolling in the aisles?
AS: The girls loved it.
KK: Talking of maths, Adam introduced me to this beautiful thing: e1
+ 1 = 0. There you have seven of the most important mathematical symbols all together.
Why is it so beautiful?
KK: Well, look at it. You’ve got the exponential e. So many processes in the world take off at exponential rates. And i: you think the square root of minus one is useless, and yet any electrical engineer needs it to design the power distribution circuit to feed us with electricity to keep our beer cold. Pi: Absolutely essential for plumbers…
AS:…and the basis of all geometry.
KK: Plus. Say something about plus.
AS: It’s the whole basis of addition.
KK: And then one. [Singing] One is the loneliest number.
AS: Unity, the first counting number and the basis of all arithmetic. Then equality: the basis of all mathematics is to say that two things are equal. And finally, zero. Think of the great arguments in maths about whether zero existed at all.
Do you get heckled?
AS: We haven’t yet. If we did it would be my responsibility to deal with it.
What would you do?
AS: It would depend on what they said and how much I wanted to hurt them.
KK: I would like to point out that Adam’s nickname is Slicer. Mine is The Prof. We have different skills. Adam’s knowledge is stagecraft and his ability to respond live is much greater than mine. I’m hopeless in a live situation.
AS: Whereas I’d fail a high school science test. His scientific knowledge is much greater than mine. Generally, when we’re doing a story for the first time, Karl’s made the rough decision on the scientific accuracy and I’ve made the rough decision on whether it’s going to be entertaining.
Do people ever get upset or angry when you do stories such as Mike the Headless Chicken?
KK: Why should they? The phrase “running around like a headless chicken” is in the common language. We just happened to find one that lived for 18 months.
AS: We showed how headless a living chicken can get. Actually, on our last Australian tour, we started with a few statistics about the dead grandmother exam syndrome. “My grandmother died” is one of the classic excuses. If you look at the statistics, your grandmother is much more likely to “die” in the week of a major university exam compared with the rest of the semester. In some of the shows a couple of people left immediately. I think their granny might have died in the previous couple of days and they were going out to a show to try to get over it.
KK: Then there was the time at Cairns a couple of years ago when this guy started having a fit in the audience at the back. I immediately stopped the show and I went running up to give him a hand and he says, “It’s okay, I’ve got brain cancer, I’ll be dead in a couple of months, I just want to stay here and keep going, loving the show!” Honestly, that’s a true story.
I don’t know what to say…
AS: Yes, I was stuck for a one-liner there too.
What makes a good science sketch? How do you choose what to put in?
KK: It’s an incredibly simple formula. It’s got to be surprising and it’s got to have a joke at the end, and in the middle you’ve got to have an explanation. For example: how come women living together synchronise their menstrual cycles? Explanation: they smell each other’s pheromones. And at the end, the joke: How do you tame a wild dog? Use pheromones.
AS: I think people also love hearing some nugget of information that they can take away with them to impress someone in a pub or start an argument at work.
So is it really true that Mike the chicken lived for 18 months without a head?
AS: Everything we told you on the show is absolutely true.
Karl, this month you won an Ig Nobel prize from the Annals of Improbable Research for your work on the origins of belly button fluff. What does it mean to you?
KK: I now feel that popularising science is the most satisfying job I have ever had. But as the master of ceremonies said on the night, “If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel prize tonight – and especially if you did – better luck next year.”