by Bill Nye
It turned out that Dave and his housemates had this brand-new technology called “cable television.” Cable began to change the way information influences our culture. With broadcast television, there were basically three national channels in the United States at the time—ABC, CBS, and NBC, plus some odds and ends. Cable began to break that up into many more streams, which meant that each one could be more specialized, giving people in the United States and around the world access to all kinds of videos and performances they never could have seen before. It was peanuts (small) compared with the kind of data proliferation that happened in the 1990s with the World Wide Web (large), but at the time, cable was a revelation. And what Dave wanted me to see was something unfamiliar that might not have ever made it to one of the three basic channels: a video of Steve Martin at the Boarding House nightclub in San Francisco.
It’s not just that Steve Martin was funny. He was funny in a different way than we had seen on TV before. And he was funny in a way that seemed oddly . . . familiar. As I watched, Dave was saying, “Look at this! Look at this guy! He’s just like you!” I thought Steve Martin’s perspective on our world was brilliant. I wanted to be part of that picture. I felt that I shared his same sense of irony or absurdity. And yes, I confess: I confidently thought I had his same sense of timing . . . or tie-ming. Whether I ever did is up to you, the audience, to judge. Steve Martin’s absurdist bit about expecting that his audience was full of plumbers who’d laugh madly at punch lines involving “The Kinsley Manual” and a Langstrom 7-inch wrench was oh-so-close to my hilariously funny bits about 316 stainless steel. Wasn’t it? Well, I thought so.
I realized that comedy in public didn’t have to be limited to Johnny Carson addressing the whole nation. Every bit of Steve Martin’s comedy was carefully packed into his seemingly off-the-cuff monologues. There was one bit that really made an impression on me because it cut right to the heart of comedy—that anxious awareness that some people in our society are on the inside and that some are on the outside. Steve Martin launched into a riff in his mock-sincere style. “Remember when the world blew up, and we all came to this planet on that giant space ark? Remember, the government decided not to tell all the stupid people, because they were afraid that . . . ” And there is that little half-a-beat before the crowd in the nightclub gets the joke and starts to laugh. It was brilliant. We are all, the whole audience, the stupid people on the outside. Check it out: an enormous shift of your perspective in 12½ seconds. Not bad.
I see a common thread in all these different examples of humor. They all play with insider and outsider viewpoints to create a shared experience. There’s not a cruelty of mocking one perpetual outsider, because the comedian leads the audience between both sides—sometimes we’re all the outsider, and sometimes we’re all on the inside. This movement back and forth, in the hands of a skilled comedian, can open the audience’s eyes to different perspectives and shake them up a little bit. Steve Martin remains a genius at shifting between mock-arrogance and mock-humility, carrying his audience along with him. My dad was a powerless prisoner in a POW camp, but at least he and his buddies were in the inside group that knew what the word “regardless” meant. Being able to move fluidly between insider and outsider allows you to look at the world from a lot of different angles at once, which enables you to see a whole lot more.
From the moment my friend Dave first showed me that Steve Martin video, the engineering-versus-comedy tug-of-war inside me began. It kept going all through my early career. But because science and engineering are wonderful, too, I still loved my day job. I loved to watch the dimensions add up to create perfectly mating parts (oh, come on, people—I’m talking about engineering plans) and to feel a drawing take shape with my hands. Working on a long drawing board, designing those wonderful mechanisms, is a specialized kind of craft, beautiful and elegant in its physics and precision. It was 1978; I was a young guy; I wanted to do some good in the world. I was fascinated with the guys who could visualize and design the elegant linkages, the mechanisms that connect the cockpit controls to the movable control surfaces of the plane. Did you know that you can fly a 737 airplane even if both engines quit? The linkages enable the pilots to use the energy in the moving air to move the control surfaces, which in turn steer the plane. How could you not want to be around the kinds of people who think of things like that?
Engineering and comedy, two of the great nerd skills, fought for dominance of my time and attention. Steve Martin’s success was amazing. His albums went platinum. One became so popular that Warner Bros. Records sponsored a Steve Martin look-alike contest. My new Seattle friends were thoroughly exposed to my obsession . . . er, my “abiding interest” in the Wild and Crazy Guy. I guess those pals liked what they heard, because they pressured me into entering the contest. I went to the venerable Peaches Records & Tapes to sign up (in the original vinyl-record era). A short time later, I drove to the long-ago-burned-down Montana’s nightclub, where the contestants each performed some stand-up in Steve’s (I call him Steve) style. I did it, and I won. Next up, the gentle folks at Warner Bros. flew me south to San Francisco, where I competed against guys with a great deal more stage experience—and I was eliminated. Nevertheless, I was hooked. I am pretty sure I wouldn’t be here writing to you as Bill Nye the Science Guy if not for my one peculiar connection to the brilliance of Steve Martin.
After my modest success as an impersonator, various promoters asked me to do a Steve Martin routine at parties or corporate gatherings. I did a few, and I was okay—but just okay. I wanted to do my own comedy, write my own jokes, and get my own laughs. I tried and tried. I went to open-mic nights at comedy clubs, when anyone in the audience can get up to try out material, and gave it a shot. Now and then, I would get a real laugh, and it was addictive. Prodded by the rapid growth of cable TV, every major city in the United States and Canada soon had at least one or two stand-up comedy clubs. The standard format is a three-person show: the emcee, who warms up the crowd, the middle comedy act, often called just the “middle,” and the headliner. I dreamed of middling. I would get home from my day job (working on a drawing board, technical document, or computer keyboard) and immediately take a nap. Then I’d wake up around 7:30 p.m. and head downtown to perform at open-mic shows.
At those open mics, I first met Ross Shafer, a former combination stereo–pet-store owner who ended up hosting several network shows, along with a second comic named John Keister. Together, those two ended up changing my life. About 2 years later, we started working together. At one of the local TV stations, KING-TV, there was a program director named Bob Jones; he was the guy in charge of what show gets put on when. It happened that Bob hired Ross to host a show called Almost Live!, with John cast as a version of an independent correspondent. John then asked me to play a crazy person in a sketch in which Ross got kidnapped. I was funny enough, apparently, as a nut job wearing a pyramid-shaped hat made of bendy-straws. I was developing my own sense of the absurd.
For whatever reason, Ross and John kept me around long enough that I eventually got up the nerve to quit my aerospace job. It was October 3, 1986, roughly. No wait, that’s exactly when it was. I had $5,000 in the bank. I figured that was enough to sustain me for 6 months even if I didn’t make any money at all in the interim. I had a modest mortgage and so on. It felt like a risk I needed to take. I think my friends regarded my decision as an interesting choice, but they tried their best to be supportive. When I was not being especially funny doing my stand-up set (as your time on stage is called), it was hard for them. That happened . . . uh . . . more than once. To a person, they encouraged me to keep pursuing my passion, although they also advised me to keep my hands on the board. By that I mean keep engineering in my back pocket in case I needed it. So I did.
My biggest fear at the time was that I might fail and be both unfit as a comic and useless as an engineer. It was an imposter-syndrome moment for me (more about that in Chapter 21). Almost Live! was broadcast for 26 very nonconsecut
ive weeks a year. I continually worried about the other 26 weeks that had to be filled with something that made money. I was fortunate that I could get work as a contract engineer. I treated my life as a design problem and did my best to make the parts fit together. I did freelance drafting work at a couple small engineering companies in the Seattle area between writing bits and jokes for Almost Live!, doing stand-up in the area clubs, and appearing on camera.
At this point in the story, Ross Shafer was not only the host of Almost Live!; he was also the host of the most popular evening drive-time radio show in the Seattle area. This was so long ago (“How long ago was it?”). It was so long ago that the hottest station in town was still on AM radio. For his show, Ross would write fake interviews with fake people and then perform all the voices himself. I listened every day, often from my drawing board at my freelance job working for Avtech, a Seattle aerospace company that makes cockpit displays and airplane dashboards. I designed a liquid-intrusion-resistant radio knob for airplane cockpits—a fancy way of saying you could spill coffee or a soft drink on them and they’d be okay. Basically, I applied my engineering skills to whatever task I could get them to send my way.
Well, one day while I was listening, someone (an actual listener!) called in to Ross’s show to answer a question about the first Back to the Future movie. Something about the amount of electrical power needed to send the DeLorean traveling through time. The correct answer, Ross explained, was 1.21 “jigg-uh-watts.” Well, I couldn’t leave that uninformed utterance unchecked. I called in seconds later to explain that, in science, we prefer to say, “1.21 gigg-uh-watts,” with a hard “g.” It was silly, but attention to language runs in the Nye family, and every good nerd knows you need to get your terminology right. It turns out that the listeners (Ross, at least) found my awkward precision entertaining. One thing led to another, and I ended with an assignment to call in to Ross’s show every day at 4:35 p.m. to give a vaguely science-based answer to listener questions.
A little idea started to incubate in the recesses of my mind. I wasn’t consciously thinking it, at least not yet, but it was there taking shape: The connective power of humor is a great way to get people to pay some attention to science. A lot of folks will tell you that science is boring or alienating or just no fun, but here I was getting people to listen and laugh. I was playing with ideas, and a bunch of radio listeners—many of whom probably never thought of themselves as nerds—were digging it. Furthermore, I felt the United States was losing its edge in science and technology. Maybe I could help, just a little.
Then came the next link in my great chain of serendipity, or something like that. In January of 1987, I was attending a writers’ meeting of Almost Live! when a guest canceled. As I remember it, the absent guest was Rita Jenrette. (She was notorious for claiming to have had sex on the steps of the US Capitol Building; even weirder, it was sex with her own husband.) When Ross tells this story to his audiences, he says the guest who vanished on us was Geraldo Rivera. When the very funny producer of Almost Live!, Bill Stainton, tells the story, he says it was Eddie Vedder, lead singer of Pearl Jam. It was a busy time; memories blur. In any case, we needed to fill 6 or 7 minutes of show time. In the world of television, that’s a lot of airtime. Imagine staring at a blank screen for as long as it takes to boil two eggs—consecutively. Ross and the rest of us were somewhat desperately casting around for ideas. (“How somewhat desperate was Ross?”) He was so desperate that he said to me, “Why don’t you do some of that science stuff you’re always talking about. You could be, I dunno, ‘Bill Nye the Science Guy’ or something.” In an instant, my two separate nerd lives were smashed together. No, let’s say my lives “merged.”
My first idea was to do some kind of sketch with liquid nitrogen, which is great for making fog and shattering flowers. Working with the head writer Jim Sharp, we came up with “The Household Uses of Liquid Nitrogen.” I thought it was funny. More amazing, other people found it funny. I won a local Emmy. After that, I was tasked with coming up with Science Guy bits about every 3 weeks. I realized that I could make impressive effects happen on TV if I was willing to fake it, essentially performing magic tricks. Magic is a reliable crowd-pleaser, and it’s a skill well suited to nerds who pay attention to details that others overlook. I tried making it look like a grapefruit could generate enough energy to run an electric motor, which is possible only with the help of hidden wires. But the tricks and magic were not satisfactory to me—not at all. I wanted to show people real things they didn’t realize were possible, and I wanted the constraint of doing real science. Comedy and science have a lot in common: They both depend on the perspective shift that comes with real-deal honesty.
The success of the Almost Live! segments slowly gave me credibility as a performer and, to a lesser extent, as a writer. From there, one thing led to another. Two KING-TV employees, Jim McKenna and Erren Gottlieb, started their own production company and hired me to host Fabulous Wetlands, an educational video for the Washington State Department of Ecology. I guess they picked up on my many references to environmental stewardship, riding a bike to work, etc. More jokes were written, more time passed, and then we created the pilot for the Bill Nye the Science Guy show in 1992.
You might know a little about how this part of the story turned out. I poured my heart into it. I loved science; I loved humor. Being able to connect with an audience using comedy and science to make them appreciate both a little bit more—that is just the best. And the response to our show continues to amaze and thrill me. I am always curious to hear what it is that people say they enjoy most about it. I’ve had many people tell me over the years how much they liked it as “educational television.” Well, The Science Guy certainly was and is intended to be educational. But keep in mind, the show was absolutely, every time, always created as entertainment first. If a television show is not entertaining, viewers are long gone. A surefire way to make something entertaining is to make it funny—though that works, of course, only if you can make it funny, like actually funny.
For The Science Guy show, I’d do almost any silly, old-fashioned gag to get a smile from the audience—or since they were the ones who were actually right in front of me as I performed, from the crew. During a single-camera shoot, such as The Science Guy show or the rehearsals for my new Bill Nye Saves the World, the crew is usually the only audience around. It’s especially satisfying when I can trigger a “crew smirk,” a real laugh that emerges as the crew try to suppress a laugh of any sort. I’ve managed it even at Fox News, where they try not to laugh at anything. Goaded by my crew, I reached deep for laughs. Pie in the face? Oh yes. Slide headfirst into real, heavy wooden bowling pins? Sure. Get stuck in mud and make jokes about not being able to get out . . . because I really couldn’t? I guess so. Buckets of water thrown at me? That one’s pretty obvious. Those slapstick segments were coupled with more sophisticated, dignified moments such as when I tripped over cables and fell on my face while making a serious point, or screamed in fright when I saw a human skull that I pretended to forget that I was holding in my own hand. Science offers a window into humor, but sometimes humor offers an unexpected window into science and human nature. Whatever the gag was, if the crew laughed, we knew we were onto something.
A practical note: If you are ever going to get a bucket of water thrown at you while you’re wearing a lab coat (as would be standard procedure), untuck your shirt first. An untucked, starched cotton shirt will deflect quite a bit of the incoming water around your belt. Your pants, and specifically your crotch, won’t get nearly as wet as they would, or do, with your shirttail tucked in. This became a small, unexpected tutorial in fluid dynamics.
My antics may seem far removed from the wordplay of my father and his Tut language, but I maintain that the two are not that different. They both rely on the quintessential nerdy sense of self-awareness and on the connective power of the resulting perspective shifts. What kind of man would happily utter a phrase like “Wow hash e roy e i shush tut
hash a tut shush hash o vuv e lul?” What kind of man would allow himself to be abused over and over in the name of science? Someone who is willing to drop (some of) his ego for the sake of the audience, who is willing to get under a joke for a little while in order to impart a larger lesson or sense of community.
Part of the laugh that comes from watching a performer doing slapstick is a kind of internal relief: a little voice in your head that says, “Hold it; didn’t he see that coming? I’m glad that’s not me, ’cause I’d never do that. Wait—would I?” For a moment, you are outside of yourself in a more aware and awake altered state. At that moment, the guy wearing the lab coat is not a remote authority figure. He’s a sympathetic guy, unifying the audience around him, allowing them (even without knowing it, perhaps) to find great joy in Newton’s third law. And once that guy wins your sympathies, you become more receptive to what he has to say and more interested in the things that interest him. Humor and sympathy, it turns out, are excellent tools for winning someone over to your point of view. I still rely on them every day.
The journey from being Ned and Jacquie Nye’s little kid to being Bill Nye the Science Guy looks like the result of a lot of coincidences, but I see an organizing principle here. First, I’ve come to believe that there are no “big breaks;” there are just breaks. I followed paths as they appeared and did my best to keep my preconceived notions and pride from getting in the way of my curiosity. I worked to avoid blinding myself to what might be around the next corner. It seems like I’ve used every scrap of knowledge I had at my disposal to make my way through each situation, regardless of whether or not it seemed like a natural fit. I became an engineer because I liked bicycles and bumblebees, and it looked like a route to a career with a steady income. I started making people laugh, I think, because it was a natural part of the shared language of nerds, and I got on stage so that I could make more people laugh. I tried stand-up comedy as a result of having made several other people laugh, and then I found my calling as a science educator in a comedy writers’ meeting because it let me share my two passions equally. Every step of the way, I worked on the craft in front of me while doing my best to keep all the other pieces of the puzzle nearby. Look at your own successes and I’ll bet you see the same kind of methodical procedure at work.