Ever wonder why a tardigrade is commonly called a “water bear?” Yeah, me too! I think the name is stupid – they don’t look like bears at all.

That was the start of my stand-up comedy set about my research last night, performed as the closing act to a sold-out crowd of 120 paying customers at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Although my postdoctoral research is really focused on determining how random ecosystem formation is, using mud puddles on glaciers as natural test tubes, for a ten minute set of jokes I focused on the two most common animals in these mud puddles. I tried to explain why tardigrades have a reputation as being basically real-life Avengers, and why their fellow metazoans, the rotifers, which get no attention from the internet, are the real real-life superheroes of surviving space and running our home planet.

For the past several weeks, I have driven to Denver one night a week for a two-hour workshop on scripting my science interests into essentially a TED talk with jokes. It’s a workshop provided free to STEM professionals. After three weeks of two-hour meetings, they throw you on stage in front of a paying crowd! (With a cash bar, at least.) I like to think of it as a comedy “recital,” like I used to have for piano or dance lessons.

The nine of us who completed the workshop performed our sets, with a professional mentalist as an MC.

I had a great time, remembered mostly what I wanted to teach the audience, and even got a few laughs!

Ever since I found out a friend, Alex Falcone, taught stand-up comedy workshops in Portland, and that part of what he asks his students to bring to a set is to have a point, I have wanted to share the ridiculousness of my day job through jokes. Finding this workshop so close to Boulder was a dream come true.

If you work in a field of science or technology and want to tell some funny stories from your career or just teach a group of interested people one interesting little factoid about your expertise, check out whether Science Riot offers a workshop near you. If you’re not in Denver you won’t get to work with the incredible Jessie Hanson, but I’m sure they have other great people!