The 36th Ig Nobel prizes were awarded this week, with a ceremony held in Europe and fungi as the year’s theme. Among the winners: research on sweet-stealing capitalists, and a study addressing the definition of a kiss.

The prizes honour research that makes people laugh, then makes them think. The second half of that formula is the part usually left out of the coverage.

Not a mockery award

The Ig Nobels are frequently reported as a spoof, and the recipients as unwitting targets. That has not been true for a long time. Most winners attend, at their own expense, and accept in person. The organisers have made a point of honouring work that is genuine, peer-reviewed and often useful, chosen because its premise sounds absurd rather than because it is.

The most cited demonstration of this is Andre Geim, who received an Ig Nobel in 2000 for levitating a frog with magnets and a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for his work on graphene — the only person to hold both. The list of past winners includes research on why woodpeckers do not get headaches and on the physics of pouring beer, both of which produced findings with real applications.

Why a question like “what counts as a kiss” is a real one

Definitional research reads as trivial and rarely is. A precise definition is what makes a behaviour countable, and countability is what allows comparison — across species, cultures or time. Researchers studying the evolutionary origins of a behaviour cannot say when it appeared without first agreeing what would qualify as an instance of it.

The same logic runs through much of the work these prizes recognise. Studies of how people cheat over small stakes — the sweets category, in this year’s framing — belong to the behavioural economics literature on dishonesty, which has fed into how tax authorities, insurers and employers design disclosure forms. The findings are funny in summary and consequential in application.

The uncomfortable half

There is a fair criticism, and it is worth putting alongside the affection. Research that sounds silly is exactly the material used by politicians looking for examples of wasted public money, and a prize that highlights it hands over the list ready-made. Scientists in fields with insecure funding have reason to be wary of the attention.

The organisers’ answer is that the remedy for being caricatured is to explain the work rather than hide it, and that a ceremony which brings a laughing audience to a genuine finding does more for public understanding than another press release. On the evidence of which studies people can still name years later, they have a point.

Sources

• Euronews Culture, on the 2026 Ig Nobel award winners and the 36th ceremony, September 2026
• Background on the Ig Nobel prizes and past recipients