Ponder Med

Trying to make sense of Emergency Medicine. A UK trainee's perspective.

  • Home
  • About
  • EMJ Blog
  • Podcasts
  • Performance
  • Cases
  • Airway
  • Cardiology
  • Paeds
  • Trauma
  • FRCEM Exams
You are here: Home / Jake / Why the Comedy Writer Chose Emergency Medicine

Why the Comedy Writer Chose Emergency Medicine

May 15, 2015 By Pondering EM 1 Comment

Author: Jacob Lentz

After we met in a hospital in Cape Town and he laudably showed me both how to start IV lines (something nurses do in the States, so much appreciated) and how not to contract TB (also appreciated), Robbie asked me to write an entry for Pondering EM on the topic of why a comedy writer would choose emergency medicine as a specialty.

Briefly, before I went to medical school I wrote for Jimmy Kimmel Live for eight and a half years. Having been involved in well over a thousand episodes of television and with a quite comfortable professional life where I worked with hilarious, interesting people while getting eight weeks of paid vacation a year, I then had a brief psychotic episode in which I applied to medical school. Having gone through many residency interviews and thankfully matched, I still don’t have an utterly simple reason for the switch. (NB: in the US we start residency training in a specialty after medical school, and only after residency are we fully-fledged attending physicians; I know the rest of the world has similar training patterns, just with more incorrect terminology). Jimmy was and still is an amazing boss and human being. My coworkers were some of the most wonderfully interesting people I have ever met. Whatever complaints I managed to drum up about being a highly-paid late night writer, I was always deeply aware that they were incredibly dumb in the scheme of things. Medicine just seemed really, really interesting to me. So I dropped out of the television business as well as most of my life, and four years of medical school at UCLA in Los Angeles later, I have a month before I graduate and begin insisting that everyone call me doctor.

Having given an array of unsatisfying answers to the question “Why medicine?” in my residency interviews, I may as well move on to the next question – “Why emergency medicine?”

There are, of course, the obvious reasons a comedy writer would find the emergency department appealing: the nocturnal existence, the precarious zoo atmosphere, lots of thinking on your feet, the need to make decisions that are at least partially instinct and impulse – not to mention the inherent inability to form lasting human connections and an abundance of shameful food items that everyone somehow convinces themselves will help them do their work but just end up making them feel sad inside.

Most comedy writers and comedians would include the above items on a list entitled “Things That I’d Like To Have Be Part Of All Work Environments Forever.”

There are differences, of course. The cult of outdoors activities that has sadly gripped the emergency medicine community worldwide has thankfully yet to invade most of the comedy world, which is protected by both a moat of crippling self-awareness and a kindly indulgence for an absence of physical fitness.  When I began interviewing at residency programs, I decided to be radically honest (versus the incredible mendacity of my day-to-day) and so found myself saying things like, “I don’t want to be somewhere where people play beer pong after mountain biking after beach volleyball after ziplining.” This had less to do with my being too good for those things than knowing that I’m terrible at all of them. Describing how much I would hate to go on what I presumed to be their annual resident rafting trip (which it turned out the program did indeed have), I said, “If everyone wants to go rafting, I’ll go along once just to fit in, and after that I’ll fake all manner of illness to avoid ever doing it again.”

Which I never thought was a selling point to programs at all – I know I sound like a misanthrope! Who hates social gatherings! Which is only partially the case!

Anyway, may as well be upfront. And for the record, I walked off a mountain in Cape Town, parachuted to the ground, and landed without vomiting and/or crying. But given my druthers, I’d just stay inside and return phone calls while eating a tin of muffins.

Comedy culture has its own negative aspects, too. Emergency physicians, by dint of being doctors, are incapable of the sort of casual emotional brutality that serves as a tent pole of the world of comedy. The things that come out of the mouths of people who are professionally funny are often disturbing, usually terrible, and frequently true. Needless to say the moment I began medical school I decided to lock that part of my brain in a vault forever. It is a profession where being mean to your colleagues is a good thing – and the more creative the cruelty the better. Everything is said without hesitation as a matter of course. That sort of wanton rancor would be a terrible addition to medical training, and it is best confined to emotional pachyderms.

But my oh my, it does keep you on your toes.

It was always amusing to me when, during my clerkships, some resident or attending would begin giving me their opinion about my work, usually trying to be “constructive” rather than purely critical. All I could think was, “I’ve been called fat on national television! More than once! So let me have it already!”

But that wouldn’t be right, in part because the hierarchy of medicine includes the unspoken caveat that you cannot fight back. In comedy you can hit back as much you want and more. It’s an egalitarian lunacy.

Which is something else that appealed to me about emergency medicine. Perhaps because of its relative youth, and perhaps also because of the stakes involved, there is less of the hierarchy in the field than I see in other specialties. I appreciate order and structure (honest), but the relative equality of emergency medicine resonated with the comedy writer in me.

It has been said that comedy is as close to true justice as exists in real life – if you are funny, you are funny, and if you aren’t, then there is nothing that can hide it. Emergency medicine often treats very frightening, fast-moving pathology, and being good – not your dress, not your pushiness – is what matters. It seems to my pretty untrained eye that the short windows between presentation and decision allow that sorting to become clear faster.

Perhaps also because of its youth, it has a remarkably collaborative spirit, much as a good writers’ room has when the comedy engine is oiled well and firing on all cylinders. People in emergency
medicine seem to enjoy seeing each other succeed, and they seem to like helping one another. Both of which were pleasant findings for me.

In comedy there is often little time to meditate on that day’s shortcoming and failings. You digest them, learn what you can, and move on – there’s another show that needs to me made tomorrow. Emergency medicine, too, has the tomorrow-try-again ethic, if only because today’s successes and failures are now done, and tomorrow is going to bring a whole new set of patients and problems.

And, as in comedy, the only thing you can do is learn something and improve. And then maybe over time, suddenly it’s workable as a job and the weird world you’ve joined feels familiar and maybe not so insane after all.

Of course, I could be wrong about all of this – I’m still a medical student, after all. So there’s always business school.

Jacob Lentz is a medical student at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. In June 2015 he will join the UCLA Emergency Medicine Residency Class of 2019.

 
 

Filed Under: Jake Tagged With: Comedian, Comedy, EM, Jimmy Kimmel Live

Authors

  • Adam Walker
  • Andrew Wilkinson
  • John Gilbert
  • Pondering EM

Comments

  1. Jimmy Dunn says

    March 24, 2016 at 9:41 pm

    Congrats Jake! Comedy will still have you back after business school.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Follow Ponder Med

Search

Twitter Feed

Tweets by @PonderingEM

Tags

Airway Anders Ericsson Aviation Black Box Thinking Clinical Entrepreneur Programme Closed Loop Communication Comedy COVID COVID 19 Deliberate Practice digital health ECG EM Emergency Medicine Emergency Medicine Journal EMJ EMJ Blog healthcare Human Factors Jake Jimmy Kimmel Live Jocko Willink Khayelitsha Hospital mental toughness Metacognition Mindset MRCEM MRCEM Part A Paeds Peak performance psychology Pilots Podcast PonderMed Project Wingman Purposeful Practice Readback resilience RSI sim Simulation Situational awareness stress inoculation Trauma UCLA

Archives

  • November 2022 (1)
  • October 2022 (1)
  • October 2020 (1)
  • July 2020 (2)
  • June 2020 (7)
  • May 2020 (7)
  • April 2020 (2)
  • December 2019 (1)
  • December 2018 (2)
  • November 2018 (5)
  • October 2018 (4)
  • April 2018 (1)
  • March 2018 (1)
  • February 2018 (1)
  • January 2018 (2)
  • November 2017 (2)
  • October 2017 (1)
  • August 2017 (2)
  • July 2017 (1)
  • June 2017 (1)
  • May 2017 (2)
  • April 2017 (1)
  • March 2017 (2)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (2)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (2)
  • October 2016 (3)
  • September 2016 (2)
  • August 2016 (1)
  • July 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (3)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (1)
  • February 2016 (3)
  • January 2016 (2)
  • September 2015 (2)
  • August 2015 (2)
  • July 2015 (3)
  • May 2015 (2)
  • April 2015 (1)
  • March 2015 (2)
  • January 2015 (1)
  • October 2014 (1)
  • September 2014 (1)
  • August 2014 (2)
  • June 2014 (2)

Categories

Cases EMJ Blogs Jake Journal Club Monthly update MRCEM Exams Performance Podcasts Pondering Airway Pondering Cardiology Pondering Paeds Pondering Tox Pondering Trauma Uncategorised
Reflecting on two months as a Sydney HEMS registrar

*Originally posted on the Sydney HEMS blog Uniform fitted. Induction complete. 10-mission milestone reached. It has been a learning frenzy. I’m a UK-trained emergency physician, and am two months into my year as a Sydney HEMS registrar. Some of my early reflections on the experience have had time to crystallise into bloggable form… I’m one […]

Disclaimers:

Patient confidentiality will never be breached, and the details of cases discussed will be modified appropriately. The views/opinions on this blog are very much my own, and do not reflect the views of our employers. The content of this blog is not medical advice.

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in