Funny Stories About Serious Things: 5 Reasons Humor Is Important In Health Care

When Kelli Dunham’s life partner was quite ill with metastatic ovarian cancer, she called her from the grocery store to ask if there was anything she could bring for her. “She responded ‘How about a quarter pound of the will to live?’” says Dunham. “I took a deep breath and said ‘honey, I’m at Trader Joe’s and you know how they are. They only had organic and now it’s all gone.’ She responded ‘Aw, nuts I had a coupon too.’ And later that evening, we had a very hard but very needed discussion about Heather’s end of life choices, a discussion we could have never had without her joke to me…and my response.” A specialist on the topic of humor in health care, Dunham is an RN and professional comic, storyteller, writer and educator who has written for Time.com, Refinery29, Thought Catalog, The New Republic, The Frisky, Huffpost Personal, the NPR health blog, among others. Her specialization is especially essential now, as health care systems and all the professionals who keep it going must manage a COVID-caused stress test in real time.

Funny things live in the subversion of expectations and shifting of frames around facts and information. The power to think differently about a thing that we may not otherwise be able to change is sometimes the best and only hope.