Phunny Physics?

Last Friday night, as most students were invading New Haven to enjoy pre-Game festivities, one event on campus was still able to draw a standing-room-only crowd. I refer of course to the annual Physics Puppet Show, accurately billed this year as an “External Review of the Harvard Physics Faculty.” And this year, like the last, the puppet show did not disappoint.

To the uninitiated, it is difficult to explain exactly what this rich tradition, started in the early 1980s, is all about. Basically, the show consists of a large-scale, two-hour roast of the physics Faculty, masterminded by second-year graduate students. The “puppet show” is actually a multi-media presentation, involving music, slides, video, crude animations and, of course, puppets, to create sketch comedy pieces involving prominent members of the physics Faculty. Before their roast, Faculty members join other graduate students to hobnob over beer and chips, and then file into Jefferson 250 to await their fate at the hands of their former and current students.

Comedy by and for physics students? Yes, the comic fare of the show often betrayed the major hallmark of true physics humor: the use of obscure references in jokes that are only funny to those with personalities such that they would consider spending hundreds of hours learning about such obscurities. But a few pieces of truly context-free comic brilliance managed to shine through. The first was a running comparison of professors’ ratings on HotOrNot.com, and another was a rip-off of Saturday Night Lives’s “Celebrity Jeopardy” with well-known professors in puppet form playing the brain-dead celebrity roles.

But not all the humor is so carefree. In fact, every year I attend I am always surprised at the no-holds-barred nature of the satire. Students always take advantage of the opportunity to produce biting caricatures, condemning the professor who belittles students’ questions as “trivial,” or doesn’t cover material on problem sets until weeks after the sets are due or doesn’t really know the material at all. Crucially, the skits also provide an outlet for criticism of students’ treatment in research labs. For example, the most recent show included many skits critiquing one Faculty member’s treatment of graduate students, and ominously suggesting that if conditions did not change graduate students might abandon working in the laboratory entirely.

But these more envelope-pushing, wince-provoking skits demonstrate exactly why the puppet is an ingenious mechanism for ensuring the satisfaction and mental stability of grad students. Beyond providing a chance to sit back and chuckle at shared geekiness over a couple of beers, the show provides a legitimate feedback pathway for students to not-so-discreetly air their grievances. The nature of the show provides a relatively anonymous barrier between the Faculty being skewered and the underlings doing the skewering, so that small (and even not-so-small) grievances can be aired in the most blatant and overwrought manner imaginable, primarily through puppet caricature, for laughs. Thus grievances are identified, magnified and laughed at before they are able to create real and significant resentment, and the department is alerted to the most salient shortcomings that grad students perceive both in their education and in the atmosphere of the department. And all of this packaged in the form of comedic entertainment.

The power of such a means of veiled yet brutally honest communication with Faculty cannot be underestimated. In fact, such an outlet for relatively anonymous, highly visible and responsive feedback might have prevented the recent tragedies in the chemistry department. For this reason, every department ought to have such a useful release valve/suggestion box/comic troupe, especially those disciplines in the hard sciences where pressure on graduate students can silently build to soul-crushing magnitudes. I understand that other departments, saddled with a typical non-physics inferiority complex, might cringe at the idea of directly lifting the puppet show concept from the physics department. Happily, however, there exist many face-saving alternatives to puppets. The English department might allow adapted, satirical theatrical works modeled after Shakespeare, East Asian Studies grad students might put on Noh plays, chemistry students could create intricate marionettes that caricature professors entirely in ball-and-stick model form— whatever mode of catharsis toots each departmental horn. I imagine a designated “satire week,” in which students from various departments present their lampoons to the cheers and jeers of Faculty, simultaneously bonding with their instructors and addressing the fundamental power asymmetry intrinsic in the teacher-student relationship.

Can’t imagine your professors happily sitting down to laugh at themselves and drinking in the not-so-polite criticism of their students along with a few beers? Neither could I, before I witnessed it. But if physics professors can laugh at themselves, anyone can, and should, because in every joke there resides a little valuable truth.

B.J.Greenleaf ’01-’02 is a physics concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.