Festival Of The Spoken Nerd

The empirical research has been done by Festival Of The Spoken Nerd.

The triumvirate of comedy geeks have found their shows in London and at science festivals selling out so regularly, the time has come to roll out the show nationwide.

“We’ve never really gone out of the nice safe environment of science festivals, where there are sciency people,” says Helen Arney, a physics graduate from Imperial College who writes songs inspired by science and has toured with Robin Ince and Brian Cox in their show Uncaged Monkeys.

“So we’re bringing this out into the open, without it being branded as a science night.”

She says it is comedy inspired by science, rather than science with a bit of comedy.

“We will find out if there is an audience, and so far there seems to be.”

Arney first spotted the connections between the disciplines when she began penning songs.

The self-declared geek songstress has been a musical comedian for years (she is one half of The Balconettes, “a girl band so post-feministic that it is misogynistic, we hate all women apart from each other”) but it is only recently that she started weaving science into her music.

“The thing I have rediscovered doing comedy is how much fun science is. It’s more than just learning stuff. It’s a way of thinking and looking at the world, which I think is similar to the way comedians look at the world.

“As a comedian, you never take stuff at face value. You try to avoid stereotypes. You try to avoid the stuff everyone else is thinking and you pick away at what is under the surface to discover the truths that are underneath.

“There is some alchemy you can’t write an equation for but joke writing is a skill with a similar mindset.”

For Arney, there is nothing as funny as observing something no one else has put their finger on.

“That’s similar to what sciences do. They pick and find out what underlying rules are, to try to see what is happening in a way no one else has. That is what good, interesting comedy does.”

Steve Mould, who has a physics degree and has done science demos on Blue Peter, The One Show and The Alan Titchmarsh Show, will be on stage with Arney to help the experiments.

As will Matt Parker – the only person to have been a London Mathematical Society popular lecturer and simultaneously perform a sell-out comedy show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Parker starts controlled (you hope) fires on the other side of the auditorium using satellites. Mould has a metal tube of burning butane gas with holes in the top, whose waves of flames dance when you play music into it. Arney has recently taught herself to play the Doctor Who theme on the musical saw.

“Steve looks at things like, ‘How can I make a massive experiment? How can I blow something up? How can I set this on fire?’” explains Arney.

Gender imbalance

“Matt is always thinking about things in a super rational way, ‘How can I take this to the extreme of logic? How can I grind the logic down until it is almost completely meaningless mathematical modelling and take all the fun out of this but, at the same time, make it even more fun?’

“I think about things as stories and the human side of things, while trying to keep the other two under control.”

She’s had a bit of practice with that last task. The gender make-up of her university physics department was 90% men.

“There was a nice phrase we had between us girls: ‘The odds are good but the odds are odd.’

“I suppose in comedy it’s quite similar – comedy is also full of men.”

The other similarity has nothing to do with gender.

“Both are full of nerds. You may not see them as science nerds, but comedians are relentless in how they organise things.

“You don’t become a one-liner comedian without obsessive tendencies.

“The question is not, ‘Is this funny?’ but can I take one more word out to make this the perfect joke, to make it a little bit funnier?”

• Brighton Dome Studio, New Road, Friday, October 12. Starts 7.45pm, £14/£12. Call 01273 709709