#Express.co.uk Express Comment RSS Feed Express.co.uk Search * IFRAME: https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-NX7XL77 Express. Home of the Daily and Sunday Express. express_logo_christmas 7°C * Find us on Facebook * Follow us on Twitter ____________________ (BUTTON) * Login * Register Apps Puzzles Horoscopes Discounts Shop Paper * HOME * News * Showbiz & TV * Sport * Comment * Finance * Travel * Entertainment * Life & Style * Columnists * Express Comment * Home Comment Express Comment Matt Parker shows the added attraction of maths in comedy MORE THAN three million people have watched me unboxing calculators on YouTube (currently 3,106,525 to be exact). Which is ridiculous. PUBLISHED: 20:52, Sun, Feb 25, 2018 | UPDATED: 21:02, Sun, Feb 25, 2018 0 parker1 PRMatt Parker makes his mark as a stand-up Which is ridiculous. For the blissfully uninitiated: “unboxing videos” are a genre of online videos where people film themselves opening a new product. Lipsticks, laptops, that sort of thing. They literally unwrap it while talking through the packaging, instructions and eventual product itself, in often excruciating detail. I decided this was ripe for a send-up and so started a series of calculator unboxing videos where I open and review calculators. We now live in a world where an online comedy series about reviewing calculators can get viewing figures comparable to real TV programmes. This would be unheard of until very recently. Can you imagine the meeting of television executives and producers where someone pitched a show about putting calculators through their paces while making jokes? They would be rightfully laughed out of the room. I started my career working as a maths teacher during the day and a stand-up comedian in the evening. Related articles * The End of the F***ing World: How many episodes are in season 1? * The Big Bang Theory season 11 streaming: How to watch online And there were a lot more transferable skills going from maths to comedy than you would expect. The open secret of the comedy world is that comedians have always been nerds. Comedy writers coming out of Oxbridge is almost a cliché: most of Monty Python came out of Cambridge, Rowan Atkinson studied electrical engineering at Oxford, Sacha Baron Cohen studied English at Cambridge before becoming Ali G. Comedy writing requires a certain obsession with the details of how things work: the process of finding something that is funny, dissecting it into its working parts, analysing why they work and putting it all back together into a lean and hilarious joke is not for the intellectually lazy. And having an analytical mind is a huge help when doing live comedy: a stand-up routine is less of a rigid script and more of a fl ow-chart, responding and adapting as the performer gathers data about what the audience likes. But then something started to change and comedians could stop just being closet nerds; they could share their passion with the audience. I had always talked about being a mathematician on stage but gradually discovered that if I put some maths in, as long as it was interesting enough, the audience would go with it. parker2 PR Anyone can be an honorary geek for the night Soon people showed up expecting mathematics. But it had to be interesting. The wonderful thing about stand-up comedy as an art-form is that there really is only one rule: are the audience enjoying it? If the audience like it you can get away with whatever you want. I took it as a challenge to find mathematical curiosities which were interesting enough that a comedy club audience would happily listen along and not notice that I had turned their drunken night out into a maths lesson. Which is exactly what I had to do when I was teaching, except my audience then were reluctant teenagers. The ace up my sleeve was that mathematics is actually quite interesting and most people think they don’t like it because it has been mis-sold. It is very easy to teach maths in a boring fashion and, at some point, most people have a terrible teacher who puts them off the subject. The problem is, once you think you are bad at maths and miss learning a few key bits it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as you spiral further and further behind. My job now across comedy nights and working with teenagers is to shortcut people back on to the path of engaging mathematics. In the past decade I’ve gone from sneaking maths into comedy clubs to doing entire tours based around the promise of hardcore number action. parker3 PR Matt will perform at London’s Soho Theatre March 7 to 16 People are demanding geek entertainment. They want to be able to scratch their brain while having their ribs tickled. With fellow nerd stand-ups Helen Arney and Steve Mould we have toured the UK several times as Festival Of The Spoken Nerd, always overwhelmed by the audiences who come to see us. I think a huge part of it is because we live so much of our lives online these days. The internet has made it so nerds, geeks and miscellaneous boffins of all flavours can find each other. Which is why calculator unboxing videos are now a thing: there is an online community of geeks who demand to be entertained. And we try to sweep everyone else up with us. As we slaved over the most recent Festival Of The Spoken Nerd show, You Can’t Polish A Nerd, we were adamant that as well as catering to the hardcore nerd audience we should make it so anyone could come and enjoy it. Like a Rubik’s cube made of jokes we think we’ve solved it, so anyone can be an honorary geek for the night. So if you think you were cheated out of connecting with your inner-geek by a boring school experience check out the wealth of YouTube videos exploring the whole range of fascinating maths and science (if you have a reluctant teenager of your own you may even pick up a few tricks to wow them). And you can even go full-geek and come along to one of our nerdapolooza shows. Just keep an eye out for the people wearing Calculator Appreciation Society T-shirts. And that’s not a joke. ● Festival Of The Spoken Nerd’s You Can’t Polish A Nerd is at London’s Soho Theatre (sohotheatre.com), March 7 to 16. See Matt’s stand-up at youtube.com/standupmaths Related articles * When is Santa Clarita Diet season 2 out? 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