Interest in the possible role for comedy as a medium for communicating and engaging the public in science is growing. However, current research has so far been restricted to exploring whether the content of scientific knowledge is accurate and precise within comedy, and whether the public might be said to understand science better for having watched it. In this commentary, I suggest that this approach neglects the diversity with which scientific ideas and images are used in comedy, particularly when comedy is written without the explicit goal of communicating science. I present my current research on the American animated comedy South Park, which suggests a different story: science serves to expose the hypocrisy and self-interest that governs the town. I suggest that examples such as South Park might benefit the analysis of comedy and science, by seeking to explain the very presence of science in comedy and in doing so, explore the values attributed to science within popular culture.

Over the last fifteen years, there has been growing interest in the use of comedy within science communication. This paper seeks to contextualize the emergence of science comedy, analyzing the construction of comedy within academic literature as a means for bolstering the cultural authority of science. Drawing specifically from Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on power and language, academic constructions of science comedy might be read as an orchestrated moment of carnival, with humor imagined as a means for engineering public support for science, on the premise that science communicators alone should determine what version of science the public receive. However, results from a pilot study interviewing London-based science comedians suggests that such ambitions are not shared by performers. Performers framed the value of science comedy lying predominantly in the opportunity to challenge other science communicators’ own attitudes to science. Framing scientists and science communicators as science comedy’s most relevant audience, rather than the public, performers envisaged comedy as a space in which the unspoken assumptions of science could be exposed and negotiated.