Scicomm + Humor > Scicomm

My YouTube channel has been a pet project for some time now. Ever since the channel took off thanks to the triggered triggerfish video and I all of a sudden had an audience, I have been experimenting with how to communicate science, especially biology and marine biology, effectively. There are two questions: 1. How to communicate well? 2. How to do things a bit different than others.

There is some scicomm on the internets which is a bit on the brief side, catering to the attention-span challenged among us. I am not a fan. Then, there is a lot of really good popular science (same thing as sci-comm, science communication or scicomm). I try to learn from this science writing and video-making.

What is under-used, in my opinion, is humor. A sense of humor is slightly out of the Zeitgeist, it seems, which is a bad sign for the Zeitgeist. A lot of scicomm is “Bierernst” – serious like beer, to put it in German. I think humor makes folks more likely to watch, and more likely to remember what they watched. Such videos are also more fun to make.

This new video has certainly some attempts at humor. Why do fish have a hard time feeding when they are very small? Marshmallow eating underwater is a good analogy to what they have to do. We tried: