Making Math and Science a Laughing Matter (cont.) 
by Andrew Kerr
September 2006

I was surprised to learn that there were other comedians at Georgia Tech as well.

Yang Wang: Mathematician, Jokewriter

Dr. Yang Wang is a professor at Georgia Tech's School of Mathematics. As of September 11 he is a program officer at the NSF ("on a visiting basis"). He will return to Tech in two years' time.

Some of Yang's jokes were used as material by Jay Leno on the Tonight Show. Which jokes were Yang's? Only he and the Leno staff knows. That's because he had to sign away the rights to the jokes!

Here is Yang in his own words:

When I was a grad student I always liked to tell jokes, joke with people, things like that. So people kept telling me I had a pretty good sense of humor. I came from China and I didn't know the language that well. So I started to read the New Yorker, mainly the cartoons. I could not understand a single one of them. So I subscribed to the magazine and each week I would ask a good friend of mine or several friends of mine to go over every cartoon with me. As I learned more and more I started to find these to be pretty funny. So I just happened to have an officemate, Ken Keeler, in the Applied Math department. You wouldn't think this guy was a funny guy at all--he struck me as being the least funny of the bunch.

Ater graduation he got a job at AT&T Bell Labs. A year afterwards he called me up and said he quit his job at AT&T. He said, "I'm going to work for [David] Letterman!"

I said "Wow, how did that happen?"

He said he just wrote a bunch of jokes for Letterman. After he submitted the jokes the head writer for Letterman called him up and said, "Do you want to come in for an interview?" So he just went in to meet with the head writer, and then he met with the other writers, and then he met Dave for like three minutes. The only thing Letterman asked him was, "Oh you're from Harvard. You must be smarter than all of us!"

He got a call and they said Letterman liked him and had him come on board.

So I thought, if this guy can do this, maybe I can try my luck too. So I wrote a bunch of jokes to the "Dennis Miller Show." Two days after I sent them I read in the paper that the "Dennis Miller Show" was cancelled!

So I decided maybe I should write for Leno. So I called them up and apparently these guys have some sort of free lancing thing you can do. You just have to sign some sort of a form saying they have the rights to your jokes. So I wrote maybe six or seven jokes, sometimes more, sometimes less, every day. So I did this for about two weeks. And for two weeks I heard nothing. I decided I should call them up and ask for advice. So I talked to one of the staff members and she was very encouraging. She said just keep trying and one day you will have your jokes accepted by Jay.

So I went to the restroom and when the phone rang I didn't pick it up. But when I went back and checked the message it was Jay Leno! He said, "Sorry to hear you were a little discouraged. Just wanted to let you know that all the jokes were picked on a very fair basis, so just keep trying." And so later I was watching the show and I heard this joke that had to be mine. And four or five days later I got a check in the mail.

But afterwards I stopped doing it. The pay was just not that much. It wouldn't even cover my phone bill.

When writing jokes, you really have to think on the right side of your brain, Mathematics is very logical; we use the left hand side of our brains. I think when you do comedy and write jokes you really have to go into a different space.

Lew Lefton: the PhD of Comedy

Dr. Lew Lefton, of Georgia Tech's School of Mathematics, is sometimes billed as a "mathematics comedian" and also "The PhD of Comedy." He performs at Dad's Garage (a well-known Atlanta area comedy improv group) and does stand-up as well. Like Pete Ludovice, he has found a niche performing in front of math and science inclined audiences, in addition to targeting more general audiences. He also co-wrote a book called An Introduction to Parallel and Vector Scientific Computation (he assures me "It's hysterical!").

Lew modestly dismisses his stand-up work as "a hobby." Like Pete Ludovice, he has been flown to various locations around the country to deliver mathematically-inclined comedy sets. "I enjoy making people realize that mathematics is fun," he says. "Mathematics scientists and professors are not all dry, serious people!"

Lew started doing stand-up in 1982, a "Golden Age of Comedy," he notes, perhaps due to the explosion of comedy shows on cable television.

"I got into math because I liked math and I was good at it. I got into comedy because I was curious to see what made people laugh. [Making people laugh] really is one of those great emotions. People don't generally fake laughter. When you're teaching, and you make people laugh, you've disarmed them in some way. You have a teachable moment there. They've let down a certain level of defenses and opened up a little bit of trust with you. All kinds of research shows that humor in the classroom helps people learn."