Ceremony
The prizes are presented by genuine Nobel laureates, originally at a ceremony in a lecture hall at MIT but now in Sanders Theater at Harvard University. It contains a number of running jokes, including Miss Sweetie Poo, a little girl who repeatedly cries out, "Please stop: I'm bored," in a high-pitched voice if speakers go on too long. The awards ceremony is traditionally closed with the words: "If you didn't win a prize — and especially if you did — better luck next year!"
The ceremony is co-sponsored by the Harvard Computer Society, the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.
Throwing paper airplanes onto the stage is a long-standing tradition at the Ig Nobels. In past years, physics professor Roy Glauber swept the stage clean of the airplanes as the official "Keeper of the Broom" for years. Glauber could not attend the 2005 awards – he was traveling to Stockholm to claim a genuine Nobel Prize in Physics.
The "Parade of Ignitaries" brings various supporting groups into the hall. At the 1997 ceremonies, a team of "cryogenic sex researchers" distributed a pamphlet titled "Safe Sex at Four Kelvin". Delegates from the Museum of Bad Art are often on hand to display some pieces from their collection, showing that bad art and bad science go hand in hand.
Read more about this topic: Ig Nobel Prize
Famous quotes containing the word ceremony:
“Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)
“Those who marry God can become domesticated too—it’s just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word “Love” means a formal touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and “Ave Maria” like “dearest” is a phrase to open a letter.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)