I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

Many of the people who've won Ig Nobel Prizes, they'll come to the ceremony so they see the other nine winners there.

The winners are secret until the ceremony happens.

So the winners don't know who the other new winners are until the ceremony happens.

And then afterward, fairly often a new winner will come up to me because I'm the main organizer

and say, those other nine

winners, they're all so funny.

But why did you choose us?

That's Mark Abrams.

Back in the 1990s, he came up with a strange idea to award a prize for research that's apparently

ridiculous. Over 30 years later, the annual Ig Nobel Prize

ceremony may itself still be a little ridiculous. That's its charm. But many of the 300-plus prizes

it's awarded have turned out to be anything but ridiculous.

Not long after last year's prize ceremony, I asked Mark how he defined the Ig Nobel Prizes.

They're different from any other prize that I'm aware of.

We have one criterion.

It's that everybody who's won a prize has done something that makes people laugh and then think. But it's irrelevant to us whether what they've done is good or bad or important

or worthless. And in fact, it's difficult to tell with a lot of things. You know, time, a long span of time can change everybody's opinion about what's good and what's bad.

What it really comes down to, and it took me a lot of years to realize this, is everything we give a prize to is so far outside the experience of most people that it just hits them as a big surprise. And when you

get hit with that kind of surprise, you just start laughing. Some of them actually do become useful.

Yeah. Can you think of a couple offhand that sounded, you know, absurd and crazy in the beginning and then turned out to be useful?

There's one that may be in the process of doing that right now, just in the beginning and then turned out to be useful? There's one that may be in the process of doing that right now.

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