Engaging Readers Through Wit: The Humor Issue
THE CHALLENGE: To use humor to continue to build a readership loyal to the Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin
THE SOLUTION: Can doctors be funny? I was beginning to have my doubts when Editorial Board members began recounting their stories. “You’re gonna love this one!” they promised, before launching into anecdotes they had remembered as side-splitting. But their eager narrations seemed to lose their punch—and punchlines—in the retelling.
So I gingerly solicited articles from a trusted few. To complement those essays, I asked to reprint “The Etiology and Treatment of Childhood,” a faculty member’s inspired parody of academic journal articles. For “Comic Relief,” I collected the best of the doctors’ comedic moments. I also plucked an autobiographical tale from the archives.
THE RESPONSE: The issue had been out less than a week when I received an urgent phone call: a hospital department chief needed 20 copies of the issue right away to share with his colleagues. “Who says Harvard doesn’t have a sense of humor?” one alumnus wrote. Another deemed the issue, “Brilliant, simply brilliant.”
My favorite response, though, came in email form, as an alumna described another physician’s response to the issue: “When he’s feeling outgoing he comes into my office like a gazelle anxiously stepping into a clearing, tries to think of something to say, and then darts away again. The last time that happened, though, I handed him your latest issue. He stood in my office reading it for about ten minutes, making increasingly distressing snorting and gurgling noises. Finally, he darted off, but with the issue under his arm, crying out, ‘Did you see this?’ to his soothing matronly secretary.”
The humor issue received a gold medal Eddie Award from Folio: Magazine and a gold medal and silver medal from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. “This magazine serves its readership with a lively, engaging sensibility,” one of the judges’ reports stated.
