When you’ve worked on sanitation projects in Uganda, maybe performing stand-up shows called the Origin of Faeces is not so unlikely.
Still, some explanation is probably in order.
So, here it is.
After graduating from the University of Sydney with a masters of international public health in 2017, Alanta Colley worked on grassroots HIV and malaria prevention projects in Uganda — which also took in the business of sanitation.
On her return to Australia she worked in science communication roles.
So far, so serious.
But she was also in Melbourne.
"Melbourne is the heartland of comedy in Australia, and I became obsessed with going to 50 or 60 gigs over the Melbourne Comedy Festival," Colley says.
"The backstory is, I found myself dating comedians and realised the only way to recover from that was to become a comedian myself."
So a niche career in science and comedy was born and "the Venn diagram became a circle".
There have been several sold-out comedy festival gigs, tours, and shows since then; including the Origin of Faeces (science and jokes about poo), Days of Our Hives (science and jokes about bees), and Parasites Lost (science and jokes about infectious diseases).
Her first Dunedin event, a comedy debate called Sci Fight, is next Saturday, July 1, as part of the New Zealand International Science Festival.
Sci Fights are organised, hosted, and adjudicated by Colley. The idea is simple, three comedians and three scientists debate the science statements that affect us all — "Love is a chemical", "Humans are worth saving", and, the old family dinner table favourite, "We should bring back the dinosaurs".
Sci Fight has toured twice around Australia, and has found a natural home in museums and science centres. Tūhura Otago Museum will host the international premier of the comedy debate series in New Zealand.
In Dunedin, the Sci Fight topic is AI.
"Will it turn us all into paperclips working down in the mines while it chills in the sunshine painting pictures and writing poems?" Colley asks, in timely fashion.
"I don’t know if we will have a chance to laugh much longer about ChatGPT4 doing badly at Wordle," she says.
"It is pretty worrying. The paperclip comment is a vague allusion to the paperclip thought experiment, where someone asks AI to maximise paperclip production, and the AI ends up causing wars to decrease the price of aluminium and eventually sees the raw materials in humans as paperclip material."
Terrifying. But also, hilarious. It is probably best that comedians discuss this. When information scientists, policy analysts, and government spokespeople do, the rest of us are in the unusual position of being bored while hearing about exactly how humanity might engineer its own extinction.
In each city Sci Fight comes to, Colley works with local scientists and comedians, and in Dunedin she seems to have found her people.
It turns out this city of science, is a city in which a lot of sciencey people dabble in comedy; a career that is perhaps not so unlikely after all.
On the debating stage for Sci Fight next weekend, are Gerard Dougherty(engineer and comedian), Maddy Williams (neural science PhD student and comedian), Reuben Krisp (a teaching fellow in computer science and comedian), Nicola Brown (a clinical psychologist and comedian), Dr Marea Columbo (lecturer and science communicator), and Dr Brendan McCane (computer scientist and lecturer).
The Sci Fight show
• Tickets are for the NZ International Science Festival show are available at scifest.org.nz/ from $25.
• Alanta Colley is also performing the stand-up show Origin of Faeces from Tuesday, July 4 to Friday.
