It's another review! This time I went to see an honest-to-God standup show in a pub, which definitely ranks pretty high on my list of awesome ways to spend an evening. To make it even better the three standups were all massive nerds, as were the audience. But more on that in a minute. Incidentally, if you click on the title of this entry, and you should, it'll take you to their website.
The show inspired me to design a T-shirt, seen in my previous blog post, or here if you're really lazy. Please do leave a comment and let me know what you think. And comment on the review too, because you're a wonderful person and your opinion is really important to me :)
Buttered up yet? Good, let's get cracking!
For those of you who love to spend your evenings discussing scientific theory over a pint down the pub (come on, you know you're out there), Festival of the Spoken Nerd will be familiar territory. Run by three comedians with impressive nerd credentials, the pi-themed show, subtitled "Pi-curious", managed to present some serious mathematics in a way that was simple and understandable, even for those without any dedicated scientific training.
The evening took the form of a series of skits by the three scientists/comedians Matt Parker, Helen Arney and Steve Mould, and opened with "stand-up mathematician" Parker's attempt at setting the unofficial world record for solving a Rubik's cube while reciting world records for solving the Rubik's cube. What seems from description to be a rather dry premise was transformed on stage by Parker's excellent delivery and impressive multitasking into something truly hilarious.
Following Parker was Helen Arney, introduced as "Britain's foremost musical female physicist", with a love song written to woo that mathematician in your life. If pun-based humour is your thing, Arney and her electric ukulele have it covered, and she returned to the stage later on in the show with an audience-participation piece aimed at illustrating some of the more staggering numbers one encounters in the maths world.
Physicist Steve Mould leads a double life as the science expert for Blue Peter, and was introduced on stage as "the man who makes the technology work", just as the projection screen flashed up the infamous "blue screen of death", which anyone who was using a Windows PC a few years ago will be all too familiar with. Mould's segments of the show included "here's one I made earlier" models of solids of constant width, which defy description but are definitely worth looking up online, and he later teamed up with Parker for a comedic debate about which scientific constant was better, pi or tau.
Between them, the three kept the sell-out crowd entertained for the better part of two hours, even dragging several members of the audience up on stage to help explain the maths behind Russian Roulette, which they played with a plate of marshmallows and that stuff your parents use to stop you biting your nails. The result when Mould finally picked the loaded marshmallow was well worth waiting for!
All in all, Festival of the Spoken Nerd was an evening very well spent. It was refreshing to see a science-themed show which trusted its audience to "get it" and didn't fall into the usual trap of being overly patronising. With regular shows in London, and the promise of a return to Brighton for the comedy festival in October, there will be plenty of chances to see them in action this year and I cannot recommend them enough.
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