I think you're missing the point of the Ig Nobels. These are not the Razzie awards. From the very first sentence of the web page: The Ig Nobel Prizes honor ach

I think you're missing the point of the Ig Nobels. These are not the Razzie awards. From the very first sentence of the web page: The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. Note, carefully, the second half of the sentence, which the Ig Nobel committee explains to the audience every year. These awards are quite explicitly not about poking fun at bad or useless research. Rather, the majority of recent awards are about shining a light on well-executed, worthwhile research that would never become famous at all... except that it can be described in a way that makes it sound hilarious. Consider one of my favorites: Harvey, J. T. An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces. Applied Ergonomics, 33, 523 - 531, doi:10.1016/S0003-6870(02)00071-6 (2002). This is a completely legitimate paper about how to improve working conditions for sheep farmers by redesigning the floor across which they drag the sheep before shearing them. Nothing wrong with the work. But it sounds very funny until you think about it. Which is good for the researchers, because when it won the Ig Nobel Prize for Physics they got to travel over from Australia and get some global press coverage for a paper that would normally rest quietly in a corner of the literature. As for whether ignorant people will use the Ig Nobels to denigrate science: Why would they bother? It didn't take a Harvard committee to tell Sarah Palin what to make fun of. She or her speechwriters just grabbed an issue of Scientific American and flipped to a random page.