Dr. Vida Stout

We found about roughly 60% of people attempted at least one joke.

Most of them were not successful, but at least we recorded at least one joke attempt in roughly 60% of talks, whereas 41% of talks, we had no joke attempts recorded.

Because this sounds weird.

We kind of measured almost like a laugh-o-meter, like roughly what percentage of the room was laughing.

So these small attempts were earning light chuckles.

So would you call it success or like polite awkwardness?

I don't know what you would call it.

So very, very few speakers then earned this large room laugh.

I think very few of the joke attempts, something like 9%, got big laughs or even less than that.

It was pretty infrequent when the whole room would erupt in laughter.

We expected that and we did see a little bit of that trend.

I was surprised.

We expected like late career scientists to be telling more jokes.

We saw joke success working across age groups.

Like we marked early career scientists, like graduate students, mid-career scientists and late career scientists.

And so we noticed at least they were equally successful across those groups.

I think we did see those late career scientists telling a few more jokes, right?

They had that more relaxed confidence.

Their career is not at risk.

They're the big deals.