The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony is moving to Europe, and its Sept. 3 awards – the 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony – will take place in Zurich, founder Marc Abrahams said Tuesday.
The prizes – which famously honor science that make people laugh, then think – have been held mainly at Harvard and MIT over the past 35 years, with visitors from around the world coming to accept prizes and take part in the fun. Current federal politics have forced a change.
“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country. We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year,” Abrahams said.
Interest in the prizes and science in general have been strong overseas, and coverage has always been prominent internationally, Abrahams said. The Igs are not the only weird science event to start in Cambridge and move overseas: The Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses, or BAHFest, was started by comic strip artist Zach Weinersmith in 2013 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but it has roved from San Francisco to Sydney and was last in London in 2023.
Abrahams’ Annals of Improbable Research publication expects to hold the Igs prize ceremony in Zurich in even-numbered years and move in each odd-numbered year to a different European city, “a little like the Eurovision Song Contest with a base in Zurich,” Abrahams said.
This year’s ceremony is being produced in collaboration with institutions of the ETH Domain and the University of Zurich. “The city of Zurich and its institutions rapidly moved mountains (only metaphorically – in Switzerland it is illegal to physically move mountains) and committed to make this possible,” Abrahams wrote in an email. “Switzerland has nurtured many unexpected good things – Albert Einstein’s physics, the world economy and the cuckoo clock leap to mind – and is again helping the world appreciate improbable people and ideas.”
The 2026 ceremony will be webcast, and the Ig Nobel Prizes plans a U.S. event to be held locally in the fall, “a nocturnal gathering of past Ig Nobel Prize winners, Nobel laureates, musicians performing songs by Tom Lehrer, paintings from the Museum of Bad Art and hundreds of gleeful people throwing paper airplanes,” Abrahams said.
The prizes have been featured in and inspired a podcast and books by Abrahams, a Cambridge resident, and the “Ig Nobel Cookbook, Vol. 1” came out in 2014 with recipes by Ig Nobel Prize winners and Nobel laureates that was co-written by Merry White, a Cantabrigian and writer with The Independent.