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Show Humor in science enjoyed By JILLYN SMITH Science Writer Utah State University Have you seen the cartoon captioned cap-tioned "Immediately after Orville Wright's historic 12-second flight, his luggage could not be located"? Or the one with two scientists looking at a formula on the blackboard black-board one points to the statement "and then a miracle occurs..." and says, "I think you should be more explicit here in step two." These arc only two of 20,000 cartoons car-toons created by Sidney Harris. Harris' cartoons have appeared in magazines from Physics Today to Playboy, and have been collected in several books. He draws three or four cartoons a day, he says, and sells about a third of them. Some keep circulating. The "miracle" cartoon has been reprinted about 100 times and has appeared on T-shirts T-shirts and book covers, in textbooks tex-tbooks and newsletters. At the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement Adv-ancement of Science a couple of weeks ago, Harris talked about "humor in science." His talk consisted of showing cartoons to an audience of about 500 scientists, who cracked up. Belly laughs. Over and over again. Scientists (and others) find his cartoons hilarious, although Harris, Har-ris, a small guy with a constant smile, says he really doesn't know anything about science. For his blackboard formulae, he looks in his Van Nostrand encyclopedia, then alters them a little. The scientists like Harris' version ver-sion of Einstein's first equation: 3x equals 12, x equals 6. And his "Great moments in shopping": Pasteur buying his first bottle of pasteurized milk. And the woman saying to a man, "The right side of my brain says yes, but I'm waiting to hear from my left side." And the turning point in canine history, where the cavemen debate whether they should eat the dog, or feed it. One scientist wrote to tell him that his cartoon showing the square was pretty good, because total clutch weight is proportional to the square root of body weight. Who knows what makes something some-thing funny to a large audience? Harris isn't quite sure. Of the cartoons car-toons he does in a year, he may really like only about 10. One of Harris' favorites is a publisher writing a letter: "Dear Dostoevs-ky. Dostoevs-ky. We feel your new manuscript, 'Crime, Punishment and Repentance,' Repent-ance,' is much too long. You should cut it by a third." That one found a publisher, but some of Harris' Har-ris' personal favorites have been rejected several times. "Humor,'' says Isaac Asimov, who is a fan of Harris', "is what makes me laugh. ..people who don't laugh at what makes me laugh have no sense of humor and should be ashamed of themselves. On the other hand, if they laugh at what doesn't make me laugh, they are peculiar..." Although Harris may be one-of-a-kind, cartoons themselves are not new. A limestone carving from ancient Egypt, dated around 1300 B.C. shows a cat with a fan, serving serv-ing an enthroned mouse. |