Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Long ago, in a galaxy far away–that is, in 1990 or so, when I was
doing an oral history of math for the Institute for Advanced Study–I
coaxed lots of the Institute’s math and physics types into a softball
team that I christened the Princeton Eulers.

Despite weekly practice and gallons of Gatorade, we had an unspeckled
record of gallant defeat–one year by a ragtag team of historians, the
next by a pick-up team from Princeton University. We did have the best
Tshirts and the best pizza party, which we financed by selling An Abelian Grape,
my $1.50  photocopied collection of math-and-physics jokes I’d
heard over lunch, literally cut-and-pasted from dot-matrix printouts.

Mathematical biologist Joel Cohen
was our most generous patron–he bought 10 copies! Then he suggested
that he and I should merge science-joke collections for a real book.
Two years later, Simon and Schuster’s Fireside (paperback) house
published Absolute Zero Gravity, by Betsy Devine and Joel E. Cohen.

Within months, our editor left Simon and Schuster, leaving our book an
orphan, soon out of print. Of course you can still get copies on the
web–but I urge would-be-readers to avoid sellers who want $25 or more.
It’s a little paperback book that originally sold for $8–and the jokes
that went into it have been widely told elsewhere since then. I still
get people emailing me “great science jokes” that are word-for-word the
version I wrote down for AZG.