Public Engagement without the Public: Making Sense of Science Comedy

• In Event: Humour As Topic, Discourse and Method For STS

Abstract

Philosophers and social theorists have often noted and celebrated the apparent potency of humour, highlighting its apparent ability to unmask the contingencies of hegemonic forms of power and speech and facilitate social cohesion that can facilitate useful disruption. In the science communication industry in the United Kingdom, humour has been cited as a potential way to foster new audiences for science and allow them to see science in new, positive ways. However, studies of humour in practice have urged caution, noting how humour often reproduces and reinforces stratification and inequity as much at it might challenge it. This paper presents exploratory work in science comedy, using a communities of practice approach based on ethnographic research conducted with a training scheme for science communicators in the United Kingdom that used humour and comedy as training and performance tools. By examining science communication as a practice, I suggest that humour comes to be understood and practised less as a way to engage public audiences and build science communication work around them, but rather to quarantine the public, enabling forms of practice where for the most part, science communicators are performing to one another. Where the field of science communication primarily works to offer opportunities to communicators, humour enables new ways to navigate the often inequitable terrain of the field, gaining the ability to improvise the roles of the good scientist and science communicator, as recognised within the field, one that offers the public little role but to laugh.

Author

• Edward Bankes, UCL STS