Did you hear the one about the doctor? An examination of doctor jokes posted on Facebook

Social networking sites such as Facebook have become immensely popular in recent years and present a unique opportunity for researchers to eavesdrop on the collective conversation of current societal issues. We sought to explore doctor-related humor by examining doctor jokes posted on Facebook. We p...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of medical Internet research 2014-02, Vol.16 (2), p.e41-e41
Main Authors: Davis, Matthew A, Haney, Carol Sue, Weeks, William B, Sirovich, Brenda E, Anthony, Denise L
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Agreements
Communication
Cross-Sectional Studies
Current events
Doctors
Female
Friends
Friendship
Health care
Humans
Humor
Humour
Jokes
Male
Medical research
Medicine
Middle Aged
Networking
Online social networks
Original Paper
Patients
Physicians
Separated
Social Media
Social networks
Social research
Surgery
Wit and humor
Wit and Humor as Topic
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Summary:Social networking sites such as Facebook have become immensely popular in recent years and present a unique opportunity for researchers to eavesdrop on the collective conversation of current societal issues. We sought to explore doctor-related humor by examining doctor jokes posted on Facebook. We performed a cross-sectional study of 33,326 monitored Facebook users, 263 (0.79%) of whom posted a joke that referenced doctors on their Facebook wall during a 6-month observation period (December 15, 2010 to June 16, 2011). We compared characteristics of so-called jokers to nonjokers and identified the characteristics of jokes that predicted joke success measured by having elicited at least one electronic laugh (eg, an LOL or "laughing out loud") as well as the total number of Facebook "likes" the joke received. Jokers told 156 unique doctor jokes and were the same age as nonjokers but had larger social networks (median Facebook friends 227 vs 132, P
ISSN:1438-8871
1439-4456
1438-8871
DOI:10.2196/jmir.2797