25 Most Hilarious Ig Nobel Prizes Ever Awarded
Science is serious business — until it isn’t. Every year since 1991, a group of brilliant minds has gathered at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre to celebrate the most gloriously absurd achievements in research. These are the Ig Nobel Prizes, and they exist for one beautiful purpose: to honor work that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think.”
Organized by Marc Abrahams and the Annals of Improbable Research magazine, the Ig Nobels are presented by actual Nobel laureates, which somehow makes the whole affair even more magnificent. Winners receive a worthless certificate, a ten-trillion-dollar Zimbabwean bill, and a non-speaking standing ovation. Ten prizes are handed out each year across categories like Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Biology, and Peace — and the research behind each one is more wonderfully bizarre than the last.
What follows is the definitive curated list of the 25 most hilarious Ig Nobel Prizes ever awarded. These aren’t just weird for weird’s sake — each one encapsulates that perfect “laugh, then think” spirit that makes science genuinely irresistible.
What Makes an Ig Nobel Prize Truly Hilarious?
The best Ig Nobel winners share a common DNA: they tackle a question so absurd that your first instinct is to laugh, and your second is to realize someone actually needed to ask it. The humor isn’t mean-spirited — it’s the humor of genuine curiosity, of a researcher staring at something everyone else ignores and saying, “But why, though?”
With that standard in mind, here are 25 winners that absolutely nail it.
The 25 Most Hilarious Ig Nobel Prizes Ever Awarded
1. 1992 Physics — Crop Circles and Field Theory
The Research: The Ig Nobel committee awarded researchers for “circular contributions to field theory based on the geometrical destruction of English crops” — a gloriously academic way of recognizing crop circle hoaxers.
The Laugh: Crop circles were framed using genuine theoretical physics terminology, making rural prank-making sound like a legitimate branch of science.
The Think: It raises a real question about how we assign scientific credibility — and how easily the language of academia can dress up almost anything.
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2. 1995 Psychology — Pigeons That Appreciate Fine Art
Researchers: Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita
The Research: This team successfully trained pigeons to discriminate between paintings by Picasso and Monet — with remarkable accuracy.
The Laugh: The image of a pigeon confidently pecking at a Cubist canvas while rejecting Impressionism is genuinely delightful.
The Think: It reveals fascinating insights into pattern recognition and visual processing in birds, with real implications for understanding animal cognition.
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3. 1996 Biology — Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream for Leeches
Researchers: Anders Barheim and Hogne Sandvik
The Research: Their paper was titled, without irony, “Effect of Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches.”
The Laugh: It reads like a terrible recipe for the world’s worst dinner party — except the dinner guests are parasitic worms.
The Think: Understanding what affects leech feeding behavior has genuine implications for their medicinal use, which is still practiced in microsurgery today.
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4. 1999 Chemistry — The Perfume of the Stinkbug
Researcher: Takeshi Makino
The Research: Makino conducted a meticulous chemical analysis titled “Odor of the Stinkbug and its Chemical Components.”
The Laugh: Someone spent serious laboratory time identifying exactly what makes a stinkbug stink. With spreadsheets.
The Think: Chemical defense mechanisms in insects are a rich field of research, informing everything from pest control to biomimicry in chemical engineering.
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5. 2000 Physics — Levitating a Live Frog with Magnets
Researcher: Andre Geim
The Research: Geim used powerful diamagnetic levitation to make a live frog float in mid-air using a magnetic field. The frog was fine.
The Laugh: The mental image of a bewildered, hovering frog is pure comedy. The frog had no idea what was happening.
The Think: This is the most famous Ig Nobel story of all — Geim went on to win a real Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for discovering graphene, making him the only person in history to win both prizes.
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6. 2000 Public Health — The Bra That Becomes a Gas Mask
Researcher: Elena Bodnar
The Research: Bodnar invented a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be rapidly converted into a pair of protective gas masks — one for the wearer, one for a companion.
The Laugh: The concept of emergency preparedness rarely involves lingerie. Bodnar demonstrated the conversion live at the Ig Nobel ceremony, to thunderous applause.
The Think: Wearable emergency devices that serve dual purposes are a legitimate field, particularly for industrial and disaster-response applications.
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7. 2003 Medicine — London Taxi Drivers Have Bigger Brains (In One Spot)
Researcher: Eleanor Maguire
The Research: Maguire discovered that London cab drivers — who memorize “The Knowledge,” thousands of streets and landmarks — have significantly enlarged hippocampi compared to the general population.
The Laugh: “Driving a cab grows your brain” is not a sentence you expect to read in a peer-reviewed journal.
The Think: This is genuinely landmark neuroscience. It proved the adult human brain remains physically plastic and changeable in response to experience — a major shift in how we understand neuroplasticity.
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8. 2005 Physics — Watching Pitch Drip for 79 Years
Researchers: John Mainstone and David White
The Research: These researchers patiently observed the University of Queensland’s Pitch Drop Experiment, which began in 1927. A funnel of pitch (a tar-like substance) drips so slowly that only nine drops had fallen in nearly eight decades.
The Laugh: The phrase “painstakingly watching a blob of pitch drip” is perhaps the most accurate description of any scientific career ever written.
The Think: It’s one of the longest-running laboratory experiments in history, demonstrating that pitch — which shatters like glass when struck with a hammer — is actually a liquid. Patience as a scientific tool.
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9. 2006 Ornithology — Why Woodpeckers Don’t Get Headaches
Researchers: Ivan R. Schwab and Philip R.A. May
The Research: This team investigated the anatomical and biomechanical reasons why woodpeckers can slam their beaks into trees thousands of times per day without suffering brain damage.
The Laugh: Nobody has ever felt sorry for a woodpecker’s head before, and yet here we are, genuinely concerned.
The Think: Their findings directly informed the design of protective helmets and shock-absorbing materials, with real-world applications in sports safety and aerospace engineering.
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10. 2007 Chemistry — Vanilla Flavoring Extracted from Cow Dung
Researcher: Mayu Yamamoto
The Research: Yamamoto developed a method to extract vanillin — the primary compound in vanilla fragrance — from cow feces.
The Laugh: Imagine pitching this to a funding committee. “I’d like money to make perfume from poop.”
The Think: Vanillin is one of the most widely used flavor and fragrance compounds on Earth, and sustainable production methods are genuinely important. Yamamoto’s work contributed real insight into bio-derived chemical synthesis.
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11. 2007 Medicine — The Side Effects of Sword Swallowing
Researchers: Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer
The Research: This duo published a comprehensive paper examining the medical complications associated with sword swallowing, based on surveys of professional sword swallowers.
The Laugh: The paper includes the phrase “sore throat” as a listed side effect, which is perhaps the greatest understatement in medical literature.
The Think: Sword swallowers have contributed to real gastroenterological research — endoscopists have used them to study the upper digestive tract in ways otherwise impossible, and the technique has informed medical training.
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12. 2008 Nutrition — The Sound of a Crunchier Chip
Researchers: Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence
The Research: They discovered that electronically boosting the high-frequency sound of a potato chip crunching while you eat it makes the chip taste fresher and crunchier — even if it isn’t.
The Laugh: You have been deceived by your own ears into enjoying a stale chip. Your brain is embarrassingly gullible.
The Think: This opened an entire field of “sonic seasoning” — the psychology of how sound shapes flavor perception. It’s now applied in food product design, restaurant acoustics, and even airline meal engineering.
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13. 2009 Peace — The Most Annoying Noise for Drivers
Researcher: Stephan Stöckl
The Research: Stöckl determined which sounds cause the most irritation and distraction among drivers, systematically cataloging the relationship between noise and driver aggression.
The Laugh: Someone got funded to determine, scientifically, what makes drivers furious. (Spoiler: a lot of things.)
The Think: Road noise-related stress is a significant factor in traffic accidents and urban health research. This work has real implications for car design and urban planning.
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14. 2010 Economics — Goldman Sachs and Friends, for Saving the World Economy
The Research: This Ig Nobel went to the executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Magnetar — awarded “for creating and promoting new ways to invest money, ways that maximized financial gain and minimized financial risk for the world economy.”
The Laugh: The sarcasm here is so dense you could build a house out of it. Two years after the 2008 financial crisis, the Ig Nobels delivered the burn of the decade.
The Think: It forces a genuinely important conversation about systemic financial risk, regulatory failure, and the gap between financial innovation and public welfare.
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15. 2010 Engineering — Collecting Whale Snot by Helicopter
Researchers: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin
The Research: This team used a remote-controlled helicopter to hover above surfacing whales and collect the spray from their blowholes — whale snot — for genetic and health analysis.
The Laugh: “I fly drones for work” has never sounded more absurd or more heroic simultaneously.
The Think: Whale health surveillance is a critical conservation tool, and non-invasive sampling methods are a major challenge. This approach was genuinely innovative and has since been adopted in marine biology research.
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16. 2012 Psychology — Leaning Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Look Smaller
Researchers: Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan, and Tulio Guadalupe
The Research: The team demonstrated that leaning to the left while making a numerical estimate causes people to give lower estimates — including the height of the Eiffel Tower.
The Laugh: This is your body physically affecting your arithmetic. Your inner ear is doing your math homework, and it’s getting the answers wrong.
The Think: It connects to a broader field of “embodied cognition” — the idea that physical position and sensation directly influence thinking — with implications for design, communication, and behavioral economics.
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17. 2013 Medicine — Opera for Mice During Heart Transplants
Researcher: Masateru Uchiyama
The Research: Uchiyama studied the effect of playing opera to mice undergoing heart transplants. Mice that listened to Mozart or Verdi had significantly longer-surviving transplanted hearts than those exposed to silence or Enya.
The Laugh: The fact that Enya was included as a control condition — and lost to Verdi — is a scientific result nobody asked for.
The Think: Sound vibrations at certain frequencies appear to influence immune response and post-surgical outcomes, a line of research with genuine implications for recovery medicine.
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18. 2014 Nutrition — Bacteria from Human Feces in Salami
Researcher: Raquel Rubio
The Research: Rubio investigated the use of Lactobacillus bacteria derived from human fecal samples as a starter culture for fermenting salami.
The Laugh: There is no delicate way to present this. Someone made the sausage, and then revealed exactly what was inside.
The Think: Gut microbiome-derived bacteria are genuinely beneficial in fermentation science, and understanding starter culture sources has real implications for food safety, quality, and probiotic development.
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19. 2015 Biology — Giving Chickens Dinosaur Tails to Study Walking
Researchers: Bruno Grossi, Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo Quera, and José Iriarte-Díaz
The Research: By attaching weighted sticks to the rear ends of living chickens, the team made the birds walk in a manner resembling how theropod dinosaurs are theorized to have moved.
The Laugh: It is impossible to read the phrase “chicken wearing a prosthetic dinosaur tail” without smiling. The video footage is extraordinary.
The Think: Understanding dinosaur locomotion from living birds is a legitimate paleontological method, and the chicken experiment provided real data on how body mass distribution affects gait — with applications in both palaeontology and robotics.
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20. 2021 Biology — Scientifically Cataloging Cat Sounds
Researchers: Suzanne Schötz, Robert Eklund, and Joost van de Weijer
The Research: This team rigorously analyzed the full acoustic spectrum of cat communication — purring, chirping, chattering, trilling, twerping, murmuring, meowing, moaning, squeaking, hissing, yowling, howling, and growling.
The Laugh: “Twerping” is a real scientific term now, and the world is better for it.
The Think: Cat-human communication is a genuinely understudied field. Cats have evolved their vocalizations specifically for interacting with humans — a unique co-evolutionary phenomenon — and this research feeds into animal welfare and human-animal bonding studies.
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21. 2021 Ecology — DNA Analysis of Sidewalk Chewing Gum
Researchers: Leila Satari, Alba Guillén, Àngela Vidal-Verdú, and Manuel Porcar
The Research: Using genetic sequencing, they identified the diverse bacterial species living inside wads of discarded chewing gum stuck to pavements in several countries.
The Laugh: The amount of scientific equipment brought to bear on something you step over every day is deeply impressive and slightly horrifying.
The Think: Urban microbiome research — understanding what bacteria live where in our cities — is increasingly important for public health, biosurveillance, and epidemiology. The gum is basically a tiny biological time capsule.
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22. 2021 Physics — Why People Keep Walking Into Each Other
Researchers: Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeuwissen, Joost Peeters, and colleagues
The Research: This team devoted significant research effort to understanding why pedestrians in crowds constantly collide with each other, despite everyone generally trying to avoid collisions.
The Laugh: It took a physics team to confirm something every person who has ever walked through a shopping center already suspects: other people are the problem.
The Think: Pedestrian flow dynamics have major implications for crowd safety engineering, city planning, and the design of public spaces — especially for high-density events.
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23. 2021 Economics — Politician Belly Size as a Corruption Predictor
Researcher: Pavlo Blavatskyy
The Research: Blavatskyy found a statistically significant correlation between the body mass of a country’s political leaders and that country’s level of corruption, using post-Soviet states as his dataset.
The Laugh: “Your government is corrupt and I can tell from the photo” is the most blunt political science paper ever written.
The Think: It raises serious questions about visible signals of excess wealth, governance culture, and the embodied effects of political power — and whether publicly observable markers can function as accountability signals.
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24. 2021 Medicine — Orgasm as a Nasal Decongestant
Researchers: Olcay Cem Bulut, Dare O. Akinkuotu, and colleagues
The Research: Their study demonstrated that sexual orgasm can relieve nasal congestion as effectively as commercial decongestant nasal sprays, with effects lasting up to 45 minutes.
The Laugh: This is the most enthusiastically received medical finding in recent memory. The researchers reportedly received significantly more emails after their Ig Nobel than after any other publication.
The Think: The sympathetic nervous system response during orgasm causes vasoconstriction throughout the body, including in nasal passages. Understanding this mechanism could contribute to the development of non-pharmaceutical treatments for chronic rhinitis.
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25. 2021 Chemistry — Reading the Room (With a Mass Spectrometer)
Researchers: J. Scott Smith, Eric D. van Henten, and colleagues
The Research: This team chemically analyzed the air inside movie theaters — detecting and measuring volatile organic compounds — to determine what emotions audiences were experiencing during different scenes.
The Laugh: Turns out you can literally sniff out whether someone is watching a comedy or a horror film. Your feelings have a chemical signature, and scientists are collecting them.
The Think: Real-time emotional analytics via atmospheric chemistry has fascinating implications for content testing, mental health monitoring, and understanding the physiology of collective human experience.
The Enduring Legacy of the Ig Nobels
These prizes matter far beyond the laughs they generate at the Sanders Theatre ceremony. Science can feel intimidating and distant — wrapped in jargon, locked behind paywalls, conducted by people most of us will never meet. The Ig Nobels tear all of that down.
By celebrating the absurd, they remind us that curiosity itself is the engine of discovery. Andre Geim levitated a frog as a Friday afternoon experiment. He later won a Nobel Prize. Woodpecker anatomy informed helmet design. Whale snot drones are now a conservation tool. The line between ridiculous and revolutionary turns out to be remarkably thin.
Sites like List25 thrive on exactly this principle — that the world’s strangest facts often hide its most profound truths. The Ig Nobels are perhaps the world’s greatest annual reminder of that idea.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly is the Ig Nobel Prize?
The Ig Nobel Prize is a satirical award presented annually since 1991, honoring scientific achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” It’s organized by the Annals of Improbable Research and ceremonies are held at Harvard University with real Nobel laureates presenting the awards.
Has anyone won both an Ig Nobel Prize and a Nobel Prize?
Yes — physicist Andre Geim is the only person to have won both. He won the 2000 Ig Nobel in Physics for levitating a frog with magnets, and then won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of graphene.
Are the research projects in Ig Nobel Prizes real, peer-reviewed studies?
Yes, the vast majority are published in legitimate scientific journals. The awards celebrate real research — the humor comes from the unexpected nature of the questions being asked, not from the work being fake or shoddy.
How are Ig Nobel Prize winners chosen?
Winners are selected by the editors and staff of the Annals of Improbable Research, often with input from a committee of scientists. They look for research that is genuinely amusing and also genuinely thought-provoking — the dual criteria of the “first laugh, then think” motto.
Do Ig Nobel Prize winners actually show up to accept the award?
Many do — at their own expense. Winners often travel from around the world to attend the ceremony, which has become a beloved tradition in the scientific community. The acceptance speech is limited to 60 seconds, enforced by an 8-year-old girl called Miss Sweetie Poo who simply repeats “Please stop, I’m bored” until the speaker sits down.
Are there Ig Nobel Prizes given every year?
Yes, ten prizes are awarded annually in various categories. The ceremony has run uninterrupted since 1991, making it one of science’s most consistently entertaining annual events.
The Bottom Line
The 25 most hilarious Ig Nobel Prizes ever awarded share one thing in common: they made you laugh first. But if you stuck with each one long enough to reach the “think” part, you’ll have noticed something remarkable — almost every single one led somewhere genuinely interesting. Better helmets. Cleaner oceans. Tastier chips. Healthier hearts.
The Ig Nobels don’t mock science. They celebrate the part of science that looks at the world with wide, unashamed curiosity — and asks the questions everyone else is too dignified to ask. That’s not a bug in the scientific method. That’s very much the feature.