by Bill Nye
What I perceived as a decline in US engineering and manufacturing skill had a deep effect on me. I watched America’s automobiles fall behind those produced by the rest of the world. This was around the same time that America’s shipyards, steel mills, and many other heavy industries ran into trouble, as well. I watched it happen from the inside, working at a high-tech engineering company that had directed me to make avionics boxes that did not work and could not be sold. I was disenchanted, and I wanted to do something different. I loved engineering, and I especially loved my native country, but I was very concerned about the future of both.
I’ve thought a lot about what went wrong. The United States is a huge country where companies could continue to find buyers for a long time even if they sold substandard products. In many cases, those companies had dominated their industries, leading to a false sense of superiority; engineers and managers alike couldn’t imagine that competitors were equaling and then exceeding their own products. Meanwhile, management and labor often fell into adversarial relationships. Many factors, with one overall outcome: The failure to acknowledge mistakes, continually pursue new standards of excellence, and reject inadequate designs led to steady losses and the eventual closing of the doors. I thought a lot, too, about the future of the United States. I realized that really changing things will take years and years, but it can be done. If we focus on young people, someday the United States will be back on track, doing great engineering work and making great products that could change things.
When I left Sundstrand, I took all that hard thinking about good design and did something with it that, on the surface, made no sense at all. I committed to doing stand-up comedy. I thought seriously about what I wanted to do and what I wanted to contribute to the world. I’m not saying I was funny, but I was trying. I kept going down a new path that led to The Science Guy show, to Bill Nye Saves the World, to this book. To my way of thinking, designing a system or gizmo that someone thinks is valuable is exactly like writing a bit or constructing a show format that someone thinks is funny. It’s in the bones or the scaffold or the chassis.
A television show might not seem much like an automobile, but the principles of good design apply everywhere. The only way a show with a host is going to work is if that show is an extension of the person on the marquee. The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon is an extension of the playful nature of Jimmy Fallon. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is an extension of Stephen Colbert’s irony and wit. Same thing with Chelsea Handler’s Chelsea and, I hope, Bill Nye Saves the World. My show(s) have to be an extension of me and my view of the world in order for them to succeed. They have to be true to the design at the bottom of the inverted pyramid. With a clearly outlined vision for our goals, our structure, our tone, and our message, everyone working on the project is on the same page and moving forward with a shared vision.
Blending comedy with science remains my passion. Your passion is surely something that reflects your distinctive knowledge and experiences and desires. Your job may look very different. Still, we’re all working with the same rulebook. Great things can happen if you have a clear idea of what you’re trying to design and if you are part of the start. Good engineering invites right use.
Right now, we have a great many impulses—in politics, business, engineering, and really every area—that push us toward cheap fixes, short-term solutions, and rushed decisions. When things go wrong (and they usually do under those circumstances), often the result is a lot of useless finger-pointing. It’s easy to get discouraged. But as I have learned over the years, there is also profound joy in seeing your concept all the way through, past the 90 percent mark, as far as you can take it within practical limitations. It’s the nerdy thrill of rejecting mediocrity. Using the upside-down pyramid as your guide, you can stay focused on the things you need to do to make the world a better place . . . by design.
CHAPTER 13
Comedy and Me
If I could somehow show you newsreels of my childhood, you’d have no trouble seeing how my sense of humor (if I indeed have one) came to be. My father was funny. So was my mother. My sister laughs like no one else I’ve ever seen. She gets to the point where she can’t breathe she’s laughing so hard. I often report that my brother is the funniest man I know; I mean, he’s funny to laugh with rather than simply funny-looking. See? Comedy is that simple. But as anyone who has tried to make an audience laugh on cue can tell you, comedy is also quite complicated. It requires empathy and perspective. Being able to find humor by stepping outside your normal point of view is an important skill, and not just for making your sister gasp for air. It is, I’d argue, a vastly underappreciated tool for shifting the way you look at life’s problems and for finding novel solutions.
I was fortunate that humor was valued in my family to the point where it seemed completely normal to spend our days trying to outdo each other at being punny. Jokes and comedic replies were part of how we went about our days. If someone said, “I’m going to take a shower,” someone else would crack, “Be sure to put it back.” If you don’t grasp that joke, irony is not your strength. Maybe it’s more aluminum-y . . . uh, sorry. There it goes again. The silly, never-ending, why-don’t-you-stop-saying-that-stupid-shower-joke thing continues to this day. I do it automatically. When I was a sophomore in college, my roommate Dave Adams got tired of “Be sure to put it back” and retorted, “No, I’m letting it go right down the drain.” My family uses his reply even now, decades later. Which tells you that my family is still making the same shower joke decades later, too.
As a kid, it took me a while to appreciate that humor and comedy do not get nurtured in every family. As I got older, I discovered that people who become my friends are, as a rule, pretty funny—it may be more of a guideline than a rule. But I also noticed that some people are serious all the time. (I have a feeling you have no idea who you are.) Furthermore, some people, more than others, can produce or induce a good laugh. (We know who you are.) I wondered, Why the difference? Eventually I realized that there isn’t much difference after all. People everywhere enjoy a good laugh, regardless of their comedic ability, inclination, or background.
Humor is especially prevalent among the nerds, I’m pleased to say. There’s a distinctly nerdy quality to comics from Groucho Marx to Steve Martin to Louis C.K. Why are so many nerds funny—or maybe I’m asking, why are so many funny people nerdy? The popularity among the nerd set of one particular style of humor—punning—offers some clues. You may have noticed that the irony–aluminum-y joke is the same kind of humor I described early on in this book, when I shared my deep abiding love of the Greek letter phi (φ) and all the science-themed “phi fi fo fum” jokes that come with it. At the time, I was mainly thinking about my φ phixation as an expression of the connectedness of knowledge. Now I’m realizing that there’s something else cool going on there, as well. Punning, by its very nature, connects thoughts that you wouldn’t normally put together. (If you didn’t connect iron and irony, then you missed out on that particularly hilariously funny joke and . . . well, I’m sorry for you.) The resulting clash is the thing that makes the pun funny, but it is also a serious creative act. It trains the brain to adopt a conceptual flexibility, separating possible interpretations from the literal presentation of a word or an idea. Piecing together distantly related thoughts in new and unexpected ways is one of the most important sources of creativity, both in the sciences and in the arts. At least it should be, oui?
What I’m saying here roundaboutly is that punning is a form of information play. Of course nerds are drawn to it! Even as they joke around they are making connections, and as with any skill, the more they do it the better they get at it. There’s a funny positive feedback at work: Humor encourages new connections, and new connections open up the mind to more kinds of humor. It’s a nerdy process, though it certainly does not belong exclusively to any group. You can engage in this kind of mental exercise by opening your mind to the rich and absurd juxtapositions all arou
nd you. You may be surprised by the new connections you make. You might even make somebody laugh (even if that somebody is just yourself).
The perspective-shifting power of humor also makes it a hugely effective coping mechanism in the face of adversity. I’m sure you’ve experienced what is often called “gallows humor”—the relieving laughter that erupts in tense or sad situations. It is like the punning process, but it plays out a different way; it reinterprets events until it finds the kind of absurdity that triggers a laugh. That is definitely where some of the Nye family humor came from. On December 8, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day (west of the international date line), my dad and his comrades were attacked by the Japanese Navy. On December 24, 1941, my dad and his company were captured by the Japanese Navy on a remote atoll called Wake Island in the middle of Pacific Ocean nowhere. He spent 44 months in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. I’ve been to a couple reunions of the surviving Defenders of Wake Island, and after listening to their stories, I concluded that it was my father’s sense of humor that got him through.
Being a prisoner of war was, uh . . . stressful. Every day these guys were subjected to beatings. Every day they were hungry. Every day they were exhausted. In summer, they worked in oppressive heat. In winter, they were chilled to the bone. Early on, a sailor was picked pretty much at random and beheaded with a sword in a weird reenactment of a 17th-century Edo ceremony, just to show the prisoners that their captors meant business. My father described the guards in the camp as “gung ho.” Yikes! That’s it? They cut off a guy’s head and it’s just “gung ho” (a strongly Americanized version of a Japanese term meaning “work together,” which became a catchphrase in the US Marine Corps)? But that was how my dad and his guys handled things—things that were too hard to talk about openly at the time and that remain so today, even with their wives and kids.
Playing with language became an important way for my father and the other POWs to keep their spirits up. They cooked up an entire fake language called “Tut” to prevent their Japanese captors from understanding their private conversations; they became information play-guys. In the Tut language, you spell words out letter by letter very quickly: If it’s a consonant, you pronounce it “[consonant]-u-[consonant],” so the letter “b” becomes “bub,” and “f” becomes “fuf.” You say the vowels in normal fashion: “a, e, i, o, u.” Certain letters are exceptions: “c” is pronounced “cash,” to distinguish it from “k,” or “kuk.” After 4 years of this, everybody was pretty fast with Tutting it up. My dad’s buddies would pronounce his name, Ned: “Nun-E-Dud.” Hey, Nun-E-Dud, wow hash e roy e i shush tut hash a tut shush hash o vuv e lul? (“Hey, Ned, where is that shovel?”)
Years later, when my father taught us the Tut language, it was merely a silly-sounding word game that we played together to see who could speak the fastest. But at the time, under the guard of the Japanese, such word games could get quite serious. My dad and the other veterans of that camp were reluctant to describe or even acknowledge their war experiences, so I can’t be certain what really went down. But because Ned Nye and his buddy Charlie Varney were so fast with their Tut language, I figure it was more than just a pastime for them. I suspect that the prisoners alerted each other of dangers, like an approaching guard, by making succinct warnings that sounded unintelligible to their captors. I would not be surprised if that Tut talk saved some of their lives. It certainly helped keep them sane and focused. Turning bad into good is part of what makes humor so precious.
During the starving, gut-wrenching, teeth-clenching, white-knuckling reality of day-to-day life in the prison camp, there was the US Marine captain who was nominally in charge of my father’s contingent of guys. By my father’s account, this captain was pretty insecure, which he covered up with swagger and what he thought of as an imposing-sounding vocabulary. In particular, he was given to peppering his sentences with the term “disirregardless.” Now people—this is not Standard English, and we’re not even talking about the common nonstandard “irregardless.” The captain added an extra “dis” up front, crafting a word of true nonsense value (although it is a triple negative that mathematically circles back to a real meaning). To my father, who was quite the man of letters, hearing his captain huffing out this non-existent word was a hardship that, over time, grew into an irritant that rivaled the hunger, battering, and all the rest of it. It became the focal point for a sanity-saving perspective shift, one that allowed him to focus on a small absurdity instead of an enormous terror.
Channeling my father’s sentiment as best I can, his reaction went something like: “This war sucks. Prison camp sucks. It all sucks. But now . . . now, I have this guy and his ‘disirregardless;’ this really sucks.” Somehow this word became among the funniest things in my father’s life. It let him step outside his whole awful situation, enabling him to find some relief, an essential distraction that connected him to his wordsmith identity that existed and mattered to him outside of and in spite of his captivity. To be able to take offense at “disirregardless” in the face of such horrific circumstances allowed my father to stay connected to an essential part of himself, the civilized, articulate, human part of his identity that had existed back home and that would, he hoped, soon reassert itself once the war was over.
Everybody was stuck together in the same situation—prisoners in the POW camp, not knowing what was happening to the rest of the world during the war—and there was no point in rehashing the US Navy’s missteps or lost opportunities that landed them all there. That would have been too real, and pretty much not funny at all. Instead, my father found humor in his helplessness and went after “disirregard-less.” The release of tension is one of the fundamental drivers of humor, and the captain’s blustering became another long-running family joke. My brother, sister, and I still say “disirregardless,” often shortening it to just “dis-irr” [diss-ear], to convey something akin to the currently popular “I’m just sayin’.”
Which brings me to the third perspective-shifting aspect of humor. In addition to changing the way you look at ideas and situations, it changes the way you look at people. Many classic forms of comedy force you to stand outside of yourself and to think about how others see the world, or force others to look at the world through your eyes. It’s the essence of ironic detachment: A priest, a rabbi, and a monk walk into a bar. The bartender looks the three of them up and down carefully and says, “What is this—a joke?” It’s funny because it’s familiar but still manages to take you on a sudden left turn. (In fact, that’s a second-level joke, which forces the listener to adopt the point of view of somebody telling the joke to a listener who already knows an earlier version of the joke. Heavy stuff.) I assume my father could imagine the captain’s thought process, his absurd insistence on throwing around important-sounding words in a futile effort to feel like he was still in control of a totally out-of-control situation. More important, my father could help his fellow POWs see that absurdity, as well. It let them all share a laugh and, in the process, help maintain the tight social bond that was essential to survival.
These are some of the key lessons I absorbed growing up: Humor is a playful way to experiment with novel ideas. Humor is a way to displace anger and stress. Humor is a way of forging a deep connection with other people. Humor can redeem some of our darkest experiences.
During my childhood, I wasn’t consciously aware of these things. I just knew I enjoyed being funny and liked the way people responded to it. When I was a high school senior, an English teacher approached me about playing a part in our school’s presentation of The Taming of the Shrew. I scored some good laughs as Tranio and developed my fondness for stage comedy. Meanwhile, my brother, Darby, introduced me to the remarkable art of the comedic monologue. Darby was fascinated with Johnny Carson’s opening monologue and ability to talk about everyday things in a funny way. My brother and I got in the habit of watching Johnny’s monologue on Friday nights before going to bed. I paid close attention to see how Johnny did it—one man entertaini
ng his audience all across the country.
Many years later, my longtime friend and colleague Ross Shafer told the story of having coffee with Johnny Carson. Ross asked Johnny how he (Johnny) had managed to stay on television for 30 years. Johnny said, “I never tried to be the best guest on my own show.” Instead, he took a genuine interest in his guests and kept a thoughtful distance from himself. He had that golden currency of comedy: perspective. He empathized with his guests, and just as important, he empathized with his viewers, too, inviting them to feel as if they were on the show with him. There is an intense vulnerability and honesty that comes with this approach, since it takes away the protection of hiding behind a false persona. When Johnny did comedy, he brought the perspective there, as well; that’s what made his monologues so compelling to me. His humor was the bonding kind, not the divisive kind. It’s the same with Louis C.K. There’s a certain type of comedian who brings the audience into the circle with them to create a strong sense of camaraderie. They let the audience laugh with as well as at them.
When I went to college, science and engineering mingled with comedy and performing in my budding, wrinkling brain. I partnered with Audrey Moreland, a civil engineer (a nerd like me, in other words), and we entered the Cornell talent show, doing a jitterbug routine that we made up. We finished fourth, but man, the applause! It was huge. We took our show on the road—well, to a bar next to campus—and tried out a local version of The Gong Show, which was quite popular for a few years. Audrey and I did okay. We won a couple of dance contests, etc. One day around that time, my friend Dave Laks came hurrying over to my house babbling, “You’ve got to see this. You’ve got to see this guy.” (Dave and I had been roommates as freshmen. He went into materials science while I went into mechanical engineering. I know what you’re thinking, “How exciting . . .” Well actually, it was in its way. Dave is yet another funny nerd.)