Is the corpulence of heads of state a good indicator of the corruption of the country they govern? Is an anthropophagic diet more caloric than a standard diet? Are voodoo dolls effective against harassing bosses? Believe it or not, these improbable questions have been the subject of very serious scientific research, which has earned their authors the coveted Ig-Nobel Prize, a humorous counterpoint to the emblematic award awarded since December 1901.
“Humor is a very powerful means of communication, assures Kees Moeliker, European head of the scientific collective Improbable Research, which awards the prizes. It immediately grabs attention and holds it. That’s what happens when you hear about research or other achievement that won an Ig-Nobel Prize: you want to know more and tell others about it. Suddenly everyone is talking about award-winning work, whereas a scientific publication normally only attracts the attention of a small number of your peers.”
Serious but good-natured
In 2025, the 35e edition was held at Boston University on the evening of September 18. Make no mistake: despite their easy-going appearance and crooked smiles, these men and women are luminaries in the scientific world. Some teach at prestigious universities, such as MIT or Harvard, and the individuals responsible for distributing the trophies are genuine Nobel Prize winners. Everyone has the good taste to put their diplomas away for an evening: that of the Ig-Nobel (pronounced “ignobeul”), a satirical ceremony rewarding the most zany research in the academic world.
Here, no boring speeches or PowerPoints saturated with equations. The awards ceremony always takes place in a friendly atmosphere with disguises, musical numbers and crazy pranks on the program. Furthermore, the ceremony is peppered with small traditions: one of them requires spectators to project paper airplanes onto the stage at a sustained pace. A volunteer sweeps them frantically.
Then comes the much-anticipated moment of the awards ceremony. In physics, a team (mainly Italian) was congratulated for having studied the fluid mechanics of a sauce accompanying pasta. The Ig-Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to researchers who studied the effect of alcohol consumption on language abilities (their conclusion: “It can have beneficial effects on the pronunciation of a foreign language”). The winners usually receive a financial reward of 10,000 billion Zimbabwean dollars – a currency which, due to hyperinflation, ceased to be used in 2009: this apparently impressive sum is worth around 0.04 dollars, or 3 euro cents.
A joke turned serious
Created by Marc Abrahams in 1991, the Ig-Nobels have been distributed every year for thirty-five years, honoring scientific breakthroughs “which first make you laugh and then make you think”. If it generally rewards authentic scientists, the prizes are also awarded in a sarcastic manner: to Donald Trump for his catastrophic management of the Covid-19 pandemic (Ig-Nobel prize for medicine in 2020), to the Volkswagen company for having faked the pollution emissions of its vehicles (Ig-Nobel prize for chemistry 2016) or to several promoters of homeopathy, among other pseudosciences.
The awards ceremony, which has long been held at Harvard University, has established itself over time as a major event in the scientific calendar, in the same way as the Stockholm ceremony, which it parodies. Did its founders expect such success? “Like many successful concepts, the Ig-Nobel Prize started as a joke, without great expectations, recognizes Kees Moeliker. It has since become a serious joke.”
Since 1995, Kees Moeliker and his accomplices have also published an English-language journal, Annals of Improbable Research, which compiles the most absurd scientific works in the academic world. Recently, for example, they highlighted a study from January 2023 confirming a positive correlation between driving a sports car and having a smaller than average penis – thus providing scientific confirmation of a universal intuition.
“At this time when science is under threat, we are seeing increased interest in our work.”
Let us admire in passing the self-sacrifice of these researchers of the strange, who do not hesitate to get their hands dirty for the cause: an international team, for example, studied the distribution and size of human nose hairs among a sample of cadavers (Ig-Nobel prize for medicine in 2023), while another looked into the question of knowing to what extent the constipation of scorpions affected their sexual performance (Ig-Nobel prize for biology in 2022). A Japanese researcher was also praised in 2018 for his “lessons learned from a self-colonoscopy”which obtained a place of choice in the “Annales”.
Welcome sparkle
Does this celebration of the unusual and the improbable in the scientific community annoy certain researchers, who would like their work to be received with greater consideration? “Even if the Ig-Nobel prizes make you smile, we take the awarded research very seriously, assures Kees Moeliker. At a time when science is under threat, we are seeing increased interest in our work.”
It must be said that the initiative brings its share of new ideas which ultimately fuel very concrete scientific perspectives. The proof: Andre Geim, a British physicist of Russian origin, is to date the only scientist to have been awarded both the Ig-Nobel Prize (2000) and the Nobel Prize (2010)!
Far from being confined to the celebration of marginal research, the Ig-Nobels are proof that science can continue to amaze, in the purest experimental anarchy, and to amaze the most seasoned scientists. “It’s the spark that the Ig-Nobel Prize gives you that fuels interest in science, testifies Kees Moeliker. This is essential to continue thinking and maintaining your curiosity.”
My interlocutor knows something about this: he received the Ig-Nobel prize in biology in 2003 for his groundbreaking research on the sexuality of ducks. This award allowed him to take a step forward and promote his work beyond the narrow boundaries of the academic world. “I mean: who could have known and thought about homosexual necrophilia in mallards? he concluded, smiling.
