Does the sitcom "Big Bang Theory" anger actual physicists?

I’m incapable of watching the Big Bang Theory, it just reminds me of some people I have actually met in physics departments.

I usually say “Sheldon wouldn’t be funny if he were a real person.” I have met real-life Sheldons. They are not funny, they are infuriating. The stereotypes that are depicted in the Big Bang Theory don’t actually apply to most real-life physicists. But when they do apply, in a class, in a seminar, in a lab… it’s not funny. Those people and those situations are not funny.

There was this young professor in this prestigious physics department and I was a sixteen years old high schooler doing research over the summer. And when I would be performing experiments, all by myself, on a different university campus, on a Sunday morning, this real-life Sheldon would show up and make a comment out loud about how “This really isn’t the way to prepare those samples. I wonder why your advisor let you use this technique”. And then he would chuckle to himself and walk away rolling his eyes. That wasn’t funny, and it would still not be funny if there was a laugh track coming with it.

Another running joke in the Big Bang Theory is how most of the male characters are sexist and/or misogynist and/or cannot interact with women like they are normal human beings worthy of respect, and again, that is supposed to be funny. We know it’s like “a second degree joke”, and we are kind of “making fun of those really awkward guys”. But still, it’s supposed to be “a thing” that physicists do, and it’s supposed to be funny.

Again, that has happened to me, in real life. A professor or a grad student that speaks to you like a child because you’re a “girl”, or assumes that you’re in the wrong lecture hall because “this is a physics course, not a biology course, that’s across the hallway”. And then I’m at the gym and on the TV right in front of me there’s the Big Bang Theory playing and Sheldon talks to this very smart, very articulate woman while eating his lunch at the cafeteria, and he “baby talks” to her, as if she couldn’t read or understand three syllable words, let alone understand any physics. *Cue laugh track*.

The Big Bang Theory angers me, not because the physics is accurate or not, but because the behavior of the characters wasn’t funny when I actually encountered it in real life, in a real physics department. And I did encounter it, many times.

“Physicists are dorks with no emotional intelligence, ha ha ha, hilarious! Imagine having to do a term project with one of them! Even worse, imagine if they were your advisor or your departmental chair! Ha ha ha!”