Lew Lefton tries to succeed as both a math professor and a math comedian.
Lew Lefton is a faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Mathematics and the Assistant Dean of Information Technology for the Georgia Tech College of Sciences. He also has the role of Assistant Vice President for Research Cyberinfrastructure at Georgia Tech. Lefton co-founded and is the acting executive director of Decatur Makers, a family-friendly makerspace in downtown Decatur. He is on the board of the Southeast Makers Alliance and has been involved as a co-producer of Maker Faire Atlanta since 2014. Lefton has a bachelor of science degree in math and computer science from New Mexico Tech, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois. He moved to Decatur in 1999. Lefton is also an accomplished and experienced comedian who has done stand up and improv comedy for more than 30 years.
This story originally aired on Jan. 5th, 2018, in an episode titled “Math Problems.”
Story Transcript
My first time was in 1983. It was in Champaign, Illinois, on the outskirts of town. There was a nondescript cinderblock white banquet hall, about a hundred people inside. They were taking off their winter jackets and milling around. The loud corner, you could tell where the bar was. They were serving old style and big glass jugs of almond and burgundy. The event was the University of Illinois Department of Mathematics holiday party.
After the dinner, which was, I’m sure, chicken and corn in some form, there was a talent show. And I, as a graduate student there for the very first time, decided to get up and do a stand-up comedy set.
So this was not my first time doing stand-up comedy, but it was my first time doing an entire stand-up comedy set consisting only of math jokes. I had been doing stand-up for about a year in graduate school and I've had some success doing local clubs and open mics. This was an intentional effort on my part to kind of reinvent the shy nerd who had come to graduate school to study math.
As I was writing jokes for those shows, I often found myself writing a math joke and thinking, “A mathematician is the only one who’s gonna get that one,” so I'd throw it out. This set was an opportunity for me to collect all of those jokes together in front of a crowd that would get them. I was excited, a little nervous, but I was pretty sure my material would resonate like the eigenvalues of a linear operator, if you know what I mean.
To an outside observer, the crowd looked probably engaged but subdued, but for us mathematicians this was energized. We frankly don’t have a lot to do on a Saturday night on the central Illinois prairie.
The emcee brought me up. “Ladies and gentlemen, our next performer, Lew Lefton. One of our graduate students gonna tell us some jokes.”
I bounded onto the stage. I was ready to own the room.
“So my algebra prelim, I was a little confused. They asked me to prove that every principal ideal domain is a unique factorization domain. I mean, it’s pretty basic, right? Everybody knows every PID is a UFD. But I misunderstood them and I proved that every IUD is a UFO. Which is also a theorem, but the proof is very different.”
“Hey, why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip? To get to the other side. That doesn’t work. Möbius strip is a manifold with only one side.”
I did pretty good. I got some laughs. I was engaged. I was really actually enthused. I thought maybe if this math PhD doesn’t work out, I've got a fallback plan. But when I thought about math and comedy, I realized that I really should only be picking one, and I chose math. It was the safe choice and it made sense.
It really wasn’t a surprise. I had always loved math ever since I was a kid. I'd never realized that it was a profession for a long time, though. In my sixth grade class, Mr. Norman Schide, my sixth grade teacher told me that mathematics was actually a job option. Because at that time I thought mathematicians were like blacksmiths. They were jobs from the 1700’s but certainly not useful anymore because everything had already been figured out.
But he said, "No, mathematics is actually an active, flourishing, modern science.”
At that point I thought, “Sounds great. That’s what I wanna do.”
The comedy came a little later. I was in high school when I realized that I was curious about jokes. I started to write them down. I mean, I would listen to George Carlin and Steve Martin. I'd watch Monty Python, listen to National Lampoon, but I started writing jokes down. These were just story jokes people told at parties and I realized that I could tell them better than others by focusing on brevity, word count, tone of voice. I was teaching myself delivery techniques with well-vetted material.
So at that point I had figured it out. After that banquet, my two childhood interests had found the perfect balance. Math was my profession and comedy was in the hobby zone, which is the professional equivalent of the friend zone. I mean, I liked comedy, but I would never consider her for a career.
The next time math and comedy collided for me was in 1988. I was at the University of California, Riverside. I had done a postdoc. After a couple of years there, as I was finishing it up, my mentor, Vic Shapiro, asked me I would do a colloquium. This is a big public lecture that they have and I was pretty honored.
I was like, “Sure, I'd love to do a colloquium.”
He said, “I want you to do a colloquium with just your math jokes.”
I was a little disappointed that people were more interested in my jokes than my research but, hey, a colloquium is a colloquium. And so I did it, and I killed. I had an entire auditorium full of academics laughing their elbow patches off. I mean, there were pipe takes. It was awesome.
So at that point, when I thought about math and comedy, I thought, “I can do these both.” I've got a niche that is untouchable. I even had business cards printed up – Lew Lefton, Mathematician/Comedian. He's funny and he can prove it.
I was on the move. My next stop was New Orleans. I went to the University of New Orleans which, by the way, is not a strong research math department. They don't even have a PhD program. But that was where both my wife and I -- my wife is also a mathematician -- that was where both my wife and I were able to get two tenure-track positions, so I continued to do my work there.
But my mathematical and academic career at New Orleans was just not really taking off. I was teaching classes, I was writing proposals. I was doing papers and getting administration done but it just really wasn’t clicking. I would have probably been pretty depressed and full of self pity had it not been for the fact that, in New Orleans, my comedy career was flourishing. I was probably writing more jokes than equations at that point in my life. I even found a way to move some of my math joke material into some place that my regular nightclub sets would work.
“Hey, I was in the mall the other day. I saw a guy with that big X on his hat. You know, those Malcolm X baseball caps. I thought, ‘Cool, a variable.’ So I had myself a baseball cap made with a square root of X on. It was awesome, except where people started to avoid me and I didn’t understand why until I overheard one of them as I was passing. ‘Stay away from him. He's a radical.’”
The comedy scene in New Orleans was great. I got a chance to work with some really great talent. I became good friends with Ken Jeong, who you may know from his TV shows like Community or movies like The Hangover. Ken was actually in New Orleans at that time as an M.D. working on his residency and he and I were both trying to sort of find the path between a traditional professional career and a show business career. Although my mathematics and academic career had more or less approached an asymptote at that point, my comedy career I was pretty sure could be leveraged. I could take my writing and my niche material and really take this into a professional direction.
One night in New Orleans, I had a super good opportunity to perform at Storyville, which was the A-list club in the French Quarter at that time. It was a well -known national headliner. The club owner called me up asking me to do a whole week worth of sets. This was, you know, they called me instead of Ken or any of the other local comics. I was really excited. This is my big opportunity. I’m going to get a good tape, I’m going to hit the road.
But this was already the mid-‘90s. I had three kids and a mortgage. I was looking at the schedule for just that week: I had to be there every night; there were two shows on the weekend, and my wife and I talked about it and we couldn’t even get the babysitting coverage to do it. At that point, it really hit me. I’m just not going to be able to be a professional comedian. I can’t even get on the road across town let alone around the country.
So there I was thinking about math and comedy and, at that point, there was no choice. I couldn’t do either one. It was difficult because here I am at the age of thirty-five and I felt that my professional life had, more or less, hit a dead end. But I kept going because math and comedy were still part of who I was and I couldn’t get rid of them.
Years passed. I got an opportunity to come to Georgia Tech. It was a really good opportunity. It was not the tenure track position but it was IT administration and computer work, and it was in the Math Department. And the opportunities in Georgia Tech were much better for our family than for the opportunities available to us at New Orleans at UNO, so my wife and I both gave up our tenure and came here.
I continued to do math. I worked on a few papers, I published a textbook, and I continued to do comedy. I would do some shows at professional societies. At that point in my life, I realized that I was actually doing both math and comedy but it was not at all what I had expected. They didn’t look like what I was thinking they would. Somehow, my blend of these two professions and pursuits had become something more uniquely me. I mean, I’m teaching a class at Georgia Tech called the Humor Genome Project which is computational approach to humor. Think big data and jokes. I've published papers on the use of humor in STEM education and the use of improv in technical engineering design, but it’s still not quite a traditional career in either field.
I have realized, however, that mathematics and comedy are much, much closer than I first thought. Mathematics is the most abstract of all the sciences. Mathematicians work with things that you can’t directly experience, the infinitely small, the infinitely large, higher dimensions. But mathematics is logical and clean and unequivocally true. It’s absolute.
Comedy, on the other hand, feels very different at first. It’s a complete mess, right? What might be very funny to her is extremely offensive to him. It’s messy. It’s illogical, but still based in truth. Good comedy always comes from truth.
And like mathematics, comedy transcends languages. It transcends cultures. Laugher is something we all do. Comedy, in its own way, is an absolute as well.
So when I now look at math and comedy, I really realize that I ended up doing them both but it’s very different than what I had imagined. The end result was that now I’m a high-level administrator at Georgia Technical, occasionally I tell the dick jokes at night.
And my adviser always told me, “Anytime you do a talk about math, you should always include a theorem,” so here’s my theorem. Math and comedy are two sides of a Möbius strip. Proof? Me. Q.E.D.