Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. An aspiring chemist goes to college, realizes she’s not good at chemistry, and bombs her dissertation. She takes a class in standup comedy and decides the best way to talk about STEM is to make jokes at its expense.

This isn’t a punchline. It’s Freya McGhee’s life. Based in London, the comedian had a strong interest in science as a kid, but after attending the University of Brighton to study chemistry, she realized that she liked learning science more than she liked applying it. Her thesis dissertation—“Synthesis of Iron Nitroxide radical species using radical derivatized ligands and its use as a single-molecule magnet”—flopped. She evaporated her results in the lab.

“I was like ‘I don’t know what to do anymore,’” McGhee says. “I feel like if someone else did it, they might get further along with it, but for me it definitely didn’t work. It was a nightmare.”

As she was finishing her degree she started studying stand-up and turned that nightmare into a pretty good bit. It’s gotten 4.4 million views on Instagram. McGhee’s stand-up sets regularly get hundreds of thousands or millions of views—and lots of fun comments. WIRED reached McGhee at home in London to talk about what it takes to make STEM funny.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ANGELA WATERCUTTER: Obviously you made a pretty abrupt turn from chemistry to comedy, but when you first started doing stand-up were you joking about STEM then, or did you find your way there over time?

FREYA MCGHEE: When you’re newer I think it’s easier to get laughs for dating jokes and stuff that’s relatable. But if you’re coming onstage, especially in front of a non-science crowd, trying to get them to laugh at science stuff is really hard. You have to explain the science and then tell the joke. You lose momentum.

Right. There’s too much setup.

But then I realized if I did it with a PowerPoint, if I just put the science up as a PowerPoint, it was much easier for people to understand. When I figured that out it was endgame really.

Yes, your sets kind of feel like an advanced high school science course with a very funny instructor.

Yeah, it’s very on-brand, isn’t it? It just made logical sense to me. Like, if I put it into a visual, it cuts out the part of the joke that’s losing momentum. Or I can get to the punchline quicker if I use a visual aid. But it does feel funny to be doing science jokes and holding a clicker as well. It’s all part of the theme, really.

So how did you find your audience?

At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival there are some science stand-up showcases. So I started doing more of those and just experimenting. It’s like being back in A-level physics with the six people in your class, except they’re in this comedy room, which is quite nice.

When did you start going to the Fringe Festival?

In 2023. I did a showcase with two other comedians where we had to audition for it and it was awful. It was so bad. We were so new. Well, I was really new. I think the others were actually OK, but I was really new and I just had to do 20 minutes. I don’t even think I had five, and I just died on my ass every day for a month. That’s when I started doing the science gig.

I’m actually kind of glad it was really bad. If those first sets had gone well I wouldn’t have been like oh, I want to do science jokes instead.

I saw the flyers for STEM comedy nights on your Instagram. That was part of the festival, right?

So the next year, me and my friend Alex—she does maths—we brought a show called Comedians in STEM. I did chemistry jokes; she did math jokes. We’ve since done adjacent nights in London and Brighton and I think Bristol. We get other comedians who also have STEM backgrounds and they try out jokes. So then they have a science audience that they can try out their STEM jokes on.

I feel like you’ve also found that science audience online. The comments on your posts can get deeply nerdy. What’s the joke or bit that you’ve done that’s gone the most viral?

There’s this joke I do where I put a titration [setup] on the screen and say “Want to hear a joke about titrations?” Then I flick through and say, “Ope, you missed it” as if to say you always miss a titration. I think that must’ve gotten 10 million views. Even on reposts, if I repost it as a reel or something, it still goes viral now. And the comments are the most niche comments ever. It’s so funny.

I definitely had to Google that joke. Do you find that you alter your jokes depending on how science-y the audience seems?

I didn’t get great grades, so thankfully I’m not so smart that people won’t get what I’m talking about. But also if you talk about something that’s really niche in your field, then people in different fields won’t get it either. It’s better to keep it broad. That stuff gets the most laughs.

But it’s also scary because if you do it in front of a science crowd and it’s not right, you don’t get heckled, you get corrected. It’s really intense.

Wait, I saw this. You posted a video of someone in the crowd telling you they were a veterinarian and then you said “OK, some of this might not be right …” and then that got a laugh.

Yeah, definitely.

I normally start shows by saying I have a degree in chemistry, and then asking who else does. If there’s anyone in there that has a degree in chemistry of a higher level or from a better university, I’m cooked.

What’s the worst heckle you’ve ever gotten?

I did a work in progress show last Sunday, and I was doing a joke about exothermic reactions.

This is the joke where you ask if the audience wants to hear about exothermic reactions and then say you don’t have the energy.

Yeah, and in my head, I swear it’s right. But I just hear a little voice that goes, “Actually, I think if you change that to activation energy, it will work much better.”

OK, fair, but yours also works, so …

I do one joke where I draw a line of best fit. In Edinburgh, I drew it as a straight linear line of best fit and then after the laughter died someone piped up and was like, “Actually, it’s an exponential curve of best fit.”

What’s worse is that I’ve done that joke many times and it wasn’t until someone said that that everyone in the audience was like “Yeah, they’re right.” It’s like oh no, I’ve done this joke 20 times …

Do you think of your sets as educational? Or at least informative?

Maybe a bit. But I’d probably put that energy to other things. Like I’m currently writing a book about the periodic table, and it’s like a young adult kids’ book. So it’s ages 10 to 15. That is actually genuinely educational where I’ve divided the book into groups of the periodic table, and then each group is related to their characteristics and their properties as an element, and then I sort of fictionalized them into personalities that match those properties. So that is educational. But it could lead to me producing, hopefully, more educational content like the book.

Do you do comedy full-time now? Obviously you’re writing a book, but have you been able to, ironically, leverage your chemistry degree into a career at this point?

I actually don’t do comedy full-time. I have a full-time job, which I do really enjoy. I feel like it is a hard one. You could just go comedy full time, but you then find yourself doing gigs in Ipswich on a Monday night, which I can’t really. I don’t mean that in a bad way. But you do sort of end up having to do any gig that will get you money.

What’s your day job?

I work in sales for a construction company. So I really am in those male-dominated fields.

Sheesh, yeah. Science, comedy, construction. That’s a trifecta.

But I do really, really love my job. So I feel like it’s a nice balance at the moment. Especially with social media, you can balance your time. I can do shows at the weekend. Sell tickets, put the show on. Sunday at 4pm? Great, I’ll be in bed early. Social media is a game-changer in that way. It puts the power in your hands. You don’t have to quit your job the second that you get gigs around the country.

Right. You can do shows close to home and put them online. Because of that, do you find the heckling online different, or even worse? Do you get people who get out of line in your comments? Being a funny woman on the internet isn’t always smooth sailing.

You definitely still have people like that. I don’t ever really let it bother me too much, really. My reasons why I do comedy, especially with the science stuff, are quite strong. I know exactly who I’m doing it for and why. So when I see comments that are really, really bad, I normally just delete them—not even for me. I wouldn’t want a 15-year-old girl to be scrolling Instagram and then see a comment about a female comedian or female scientist.

So what’s next for you? Obviously you’re working on a book, but what’s the next step in the logical progression of a STEM stand-up?

I keep doing all these work-in-progress shows to build up to a debut hour. So I’d like to get to a certain number of followers where then you can go on tour and it would actually sell tickets. Right now it feels like I have a 50-minute thing. But it’s a set that has a lot of jokes and no through line. Not that it needs to have a through line. I know people get a bit artsy about this sort of stuff, but I’d quite like to actually explain why I’m doing jokes about science and bring some reason to why I’m doing this into it and actually be able to tour that show.

Right. Have a show about STEM that’s also a show about why you wanted to do STEM comedy in the first place.

I’d quite like it to be a proper show for the scientists in a way. I do feel it is heavy on dating, which I do like doing jokes about, but I would like a few more science ones and a few more tiny niche ones that are just for maybe five people in the crowd.