How to Do Stand-Up Comedy at the Political Methodology Meetings
- This is a really tough audience—the John Ashcroft of conferences. At least 50% of my stuff falls flat, and I don't think anyone else does a whole lot better.
You'd think that the audience would be desperate for any sort of distraction from undecipherable acronyms,
ΓΡΕΕΚ λεττερσ and equations and therefore easy to amuse. But it isn't. The fact that folks tend to zone out is undoubtedly a factor...
- Get the technical content down first!—humor added to a poor technical presentation will make your situation worse, not better.
- The most reliable—but difficult—material takes off from presentations made earlier in the meeting. Obviously this has to be done at the last minute—laptop-based presentations are a great development in this regard—and I've seen some brilliant riffs.
- Returning to some unexpected theme throughout the presentation usually works.
- Visual gags using PowerPoint or KeyNote are fairly reliable.
- Anything outside your main theme that requires a long verbal set-up (more than fifteen seconds) is likely to fail—keep to one- or two-liners. You might be able to get away with this if you back it up with a slide but I've rarely been able to do it successfully.
- This is a generally socially conservative audience—profanity is rare. It can be used very sparingly to your advantage: two presentators at PolMeth04 made effective use of Vice-President Dick Cheney's propensity for colorful vocabulary.
- PolMeth is probably the least sexist venue in political science—a low bar to cross, to be sure, but nevertheless don't even think about going in that direction.
- These are geeks so anything involving sports will lose at least half the audience. Most contemporary popular culture—for example mass audience television—won't cross the generation gap. Geek cultural icons such as classic movies, The Matrix and presumably Lord of the Rings should work.
- Most of the audience knows politics—or at least U.S. politics—but it is rarely partisan: Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Franken and Moore would be equally ineffective here.
- Inter-personal attacks are permissible but not common, and almost always are directed at peers. A tenured person would almost never make a joke at the expense of an assistant professor or graduate student (unless the target really asked for it...), and going the other direction generally isn't too bright a strategy either. Jibes are usually low-key: as one person put it, "Their knives are small, but they are very, very sharp."
- Comments on the general absurdities of geek culture (and political methodology!) are fine, though half the audience won't recognize they are absurdities.
Phil Schrodt, University of Kansas
Political Methodology Summer Meetings participant since 1986
Last update: 2 August 2004