But nowhere is humor pursued so relentlessly and taken so, well, seriously as at MIT. Consider the classic incursion at the 1982 Harvard-Yale football game, where a giant weather balloon inscribed MIT emerged from under the turf and inflated at midfield as the teams lined up for a kickoff. In other years, an entire dorm room has been reassembled on the icy Charles River, and a wishing well, complete with sandy bottom, water and pennies, has been erected in a student’s room.
Now MIT is preparing to share the laughs with the rest of us. This month the campus museum opened an exhibition - “Crazy After Calculus” - that looks back over a century of what America’s aspiring engineers found funny. “The Institute has a cold, monolithic image,” admits museum director Warren Seamans, who has heard all the jokes about nerds with slide rules. “We’re trying to show its human side.”
That’s also the idea behind a new book, “The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, Tomfoolery & Pranks at MIT,” which has already sold out its first edition of 4,500. And, courtesy of one alumnus who felt MIT needed to lighten up, the university now boasts a chair of humor, occupied by associate provost Samuel J. Keyser. Keyser, who publicly accepted his new duties while standing on his head, is the first to acknowledge that humor at MIT is no laughing matter. It’s a sanctuary from the grind of physics and calculus. “Humor here is a way of making the unacceptable bearable,” Keyser says. “It allows you to keep some terrible things at bay.”
MIT humor leans more to the clever than the rip-roaring. A good hack usually scores low on esthetics but high on degree of difficulty. One popular target is MIT’s landmark Great Dome. On various occasions, it has been transformed into a human breast and the Great Pumpkin, and objects such as a telephone booth and a local steak-house’s runaway fiberglass steer have wound up perched on top of it.
Some capers are more wry than physical. Take the perfectly designed traffic sign, complete with the emblem of a prototypical MIT student, that was mounted on Massachusetts Avenue to warn oncoming cars NERD XING. Other pranks utilize Techies’ engineering skills to redefine classic campus cliches. Students once installed a machine on a lobby ceiling that, operated by remote control, showered passersby with 1,600 pink and green Ping Pong balls.
So far, the museum’s hacking show has not itself been hacked, although that has been known to happen. A cafeteria tray and place setting was sneaked into a contemporary art exhibit under the title “No Knife,” but was quickly discovered. However, the USS Tetazoo a dime-store plastic model aircraft carrier (“Constructed in 423 B.C. by the Phoenician Turtle King Shii-Dawg”) lasted a few months in MIT’s Hart Nautical Galleries.
Displaying MIT’s fun side certainly won’t change the world and perhaps won’t even change the Institute. But there’s something rather comforting about knowing it’s there. At Harvard, they always seem to be laughing at the rest of the world. The nice thing about MIT humor is that they’re usually laughing at themselves.
