More inappropriate laughter

There was a particularly painful thesis defense this morning. The introduction made me want to puke, the talk made me want to either die or transfer out of this program in hopes of eventually having some professional credibility, and the questions made me laugh. They started out terrible. First a faculty member discredited the assumption that the entire thesis rests on. Then someone pointed out that she didn't at all address any data to support one of her conclusions. And finally someone asked a question about modeling, to which she answered that she'd talked to the local expert on the subject, and most of the back two rows started squirming in an attempt not to laugh. The local expert happens to be an Asian man who clearly caught his immigrations officer on a very very bad day. You may have noticed that there is a trend among Asian immigrants to this country take an American name that sounds similar to their actual name. For example, my labmate Dong-yoon calls himself Daniel despite the fact that we could all very easily learn to pronounce his real name. Well, this particular expert's Americanized name very easily inspires some rather juvenile humor.

This is not the first time the utterance of this man's name has caught me by surprise. A couple of years ago, my advisor took me to a meeting so that I could meet one of my committee members in person who I had previously only corresponded with by email due to her geography (and also to drive so that he could finish writing his talk in the car). The committee member was lovely and has proven very useful, but the meeting was torturous. It was all about modeling, which I don't do and hardly understand. My advisor was the leader of the meeting, which means that it was 45 minutes behind schedule before it even started, so by the time we got to the final presentation of the day, I was exhausted, hungry, and a bit brain dead. When my advisor introduced him, that was it for me. I very narrowly escaped embarrassing myself by giggling, but couldn't concentrate at all on his talk, which I suspect was very interesting, and possibly the only useful thing discussed all day.

Of course, all of the students in the back two rows at the defense this morning have heard this story. And of course, when they heard the name, they all turned to look at me, which of course pushed us all right over the edge from nearly imperceptible smirks to poorly stifled laughter. I don't think we disturbed anything. By that time, most of the room had devolved into whispered side arguments between different groups of faculty members, but still. Would it really have been too much for whomever helped this poor man become a legal resident of this country to explain why his choice was a bad one? And to suggest an alternative? Perhaps Harold?