Professor of Chemistry Steven Wikle, whose bubbly personality makes for punny lectures, saw a number of his jokes fall flat to his students in CHM 3120.
“I don’t know what happened,” lamented Wikle, “I mixed my best chemical one-liners and still got no reaction.”
Professor Steven G. Wikle
Eye-witnesses say the affair started, ironically, with a tired joke about a modified benzene ring called a “ferrous wheel,” but matters quickly eroded with every subsequent breath.
At one point Wikle turned to the class and professed, “A hydrogen atom says to another, ‘I think I lost an electron.’ The other asks, ‘Are you sure?’, and he replies, ‘I’m positive.'”; but the limerick failed to electrify the students.
Sensing he was losing the class, he expounded, “Remember, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate,” at which point several students fell out of their seats and out of the lecture hall.
Several of those in attendance complained Wikle was trying too hard to bond with his students, at one point asking the class, “Do you want to hear a chemistry joke?” before spelling out in big letters on the blackboard “NO”. After seconds of stunned silence, Wikle sighed in visible anguish, “that’s Nitrous Oxide, guys? That’s gold! Well, not really, Au is gold, but…no?”
Chemistry & Physics Building
Scavenging for material, he then pulled out a picture of Julian Assange, the polemic founder of Wikileaks currently out on bail, before nervously snickering, “And this is a free radical…right? Anyone? Please? Am I really that Bohring?”
The professor was working on what he later termed his “arsenic arsenal” of jokes, so-called because “they usually kill.” But the class was as inert as the neon “Exit” sign they were after.
Forty-five minutes into the set, Wikle started branching into mathematics as a way to integrate laughter into the lecture, asking, “Can anyone solve this equation? My calculus is a little rocky and…”, he paused before adding confounded, “Wait! No one? Really? Wow, tough crowd.”
It was apparent that Wikle set the millibars too high and the pressure had become too overbearing. Dissolving in his tears, he dismissed the class exclaiming, “I can’t stand this!”, at which point Wikle sat down.
