Issue date: 4/8/09 Section: News

Click here to listen to a podcast with Yoram Bauman.

Yoram Bauman started out his speech Tuesday evening saying he felt like he was teaching one of his 8 a.m. classes with the sour faces in the front row.

Bauman teaches part-time at the University of Washington in the environmental studies program and is an economist who is also a stand-up comedian with a Ph.D. in economics.

Bauman talked about the economy and other issues in his act Tuesday. He talked about how he has been interviewed by Jim Lehrer on PBS NewsHour in the past.

Bauman said the news coverage does not get any better than that when someone is a stand-up economist.

He said when he was on NewsHour, he was asked if he had ever bombed during one of his acts.

Bauman joked that since he is an economy teacher during his day job, he is used to straight faces so "bombing" usually does not affect him.

He said he did one act in Colorado Springs, Colo. with a group of bankers where his act failed miserably.

"I said 'how's it going?' and apparently it was not going well," he said.

Bauman said, at the moment, the economy is like a hamster that has been running around in a cage for seven years.

"The hamster is exhausted," he said.

Bauman said his act translates economics into plain and simple English. In his bit, he did a parody on the ten principles of economics where he translated the usual principle into funnier things such as "choices are bad," "people are stupid" and "governments are stupid."

This bit called the "Principles of Economics, Translated" is on YouTube and has had nearly 500,000 hits.

"For a video about economics, that is pretty high," he said.

Bauman said he put together the "Principles of Economics, Translated" about the 10 principles of economics as a graduate student at the University of Washington.

Bauman also read some of the YouTube comments as well.

He said some people who watched the video and commented on YouTube said they could not tell if the video was supposed to be funny or educational and another who said her husband thought she was crazy because she was laughing at something to do with economics.

Bauman also discussed a paper about the two lead singers of AC/DC by economist Rob Oxoby, which was a fake research paper.

"It's a fake economics paper of who was the better singer for AC/DC," Bauman said. "The real research paper was how music effects students, and he accidentally played two songs by the two different artists AC/DC had at different points of their career.

"He couldn't use this data for his real paper, so he made another one, which was just for fun."

Bauman also told some political and "you might be an economist if…" jokes.

Some of the jokes were "someone might be an economist if they are an expert on money, but dress like a flood victim," "they explain where babies come from by supply and demand," "they say 'at the margin' at the end of their fortune cookie" or "they have ever gone to a bank for a date."

Tasha Buchmiller, freshman history major, thought Bauman was funny overall.

She is in an introduction to macroeconomics class at Eastern.

"I liked towards the end when he started talking about politics," Buchmiller said. "Economics is really hard to grasp, and I do not understand it that much, but he made it easy to understand."

Linda Ghent, on economics professor who brought Bauman to Eastern, said the turnout was good.

"There were close to 400 seats and all the seats were filled," Ghent said. "I heard lots of laughter."

Bauman said the crowd was responsive, even though there was less alcohol than at usual comedy events.


Heather Holm can be reached at 581-7942 or at haholm@eiu.edu.

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