By Doug Brunk, San Diego Bureau
When Dr. Christopher J. Gallagher was asked to emcee a comedy event at Improv Miami in Coconut Grove, Fla., in 2005, he jumped at the chance. The anesthesiologist said that he tries to incorporate humor in the books that he writes and in his lectures to anesthesia residents and other physicians, but he'd never performed stand-up comedy to a general audience before.
"My take is, you only get one ride on this planet," said Dr. Gallagher, who is now in the department of anesthesiology at Stony Brook University, New York. "It's fun to do different things. When I got the chance to do this, people were saying, 'What if you bomb?' I just thought to myself, 'Not many people get the chance to do stand-up. So why not dare to fail? If I do it and I fail, well, so what?' I just wanted to do something different, something that most people don't do."
While on staff at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Dr. Gallagher began writing material for an orderly who performed stand-up comedy at local clubs. He submitted so much material, the man finally said to Dr. Gallagher, "Why don't you just do this yourself?" That idea had never crossed his mind.
Two weeks before the event at the Improv, Dr. Gallagher was introduced to the no-nonsense manager, who looked him over and said, "Let me guess: you tell funny stories at work?"
"Yeah," Dr. Gallagher replied.
"You think that's going to work here?"
"Yeah."
"Wrong," she replied. "You're going to fail miserably."
She recommended he buy two books on how to do stand-up comedy and practice the drills in them. "This floored me because I always thought [stand-up comedy] was a natural thing, these funny guys that tell funny jokes," Dr. Gallagher said. "She said you have to study what everybody else does. … I started watching Comedy Central and dutifully did the drills. It was like studying for finals."
He eventually got comfortable with the drills, made a list of jokes, and began memorizing what amounted to about 20 minutes of material: a 15-minute opening monologue plus a few routines between acts. He grouped the jokes by themes and practiced by "holding a cell phone to my ear and walking around a parking lot," he recalled. "Just memorizing it took a lot of work."
His 11-year-old daughter served as his litmus test for the jokes, "because I wanted them to all be clean," he said. "You can reach beneath the belt [in comedy], and people do it all the time, but I didn't want to do that. I also didn't want to make [the jokes] all medical, because that's almost too easy, 'Oh, here's a doctor. He's doing doctor jokes.' I had Paris Hilton jokes and all different kinds of things."
In one part of his set, he talked about taking his car to get an oil change. "Now, I know nothing about cars, so when the guy asked, 'What kind of oil?' I said, 'Look in the computer. Whatever you gave me last time.'"
Then he asked, '10W40?' I repeated, 'I don't know! Put in whatever you put in most cars!'
He said, '10W30?'
"I said, 'Look, put in a gallon of Crisco, put it in the oven at 450° for an hour, sprinkle it with cheese, and I'll pick it up.'"
Dr. Gallagher is currently penning his eighth book.
Humor plays a role in most of his work, including "Board Stiff Too: Preparing for the Anesthesia Orals" (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2001); "Board Stiff TEE: Transesophageal Echocardiography" (2004), and "Simulation in Anesthesia" (2007), which are both also publications of Elsevier.
On the 'Residency' Circuit
Until a few years ago, Dr. Stu Silverstein was giving four to five medical humor talks at medical conventions, staff retreats, and other health care events around the country each month. He started performing stand-up comedy in 1987 during his pediatric residency in San Francisco, a time when he was "going the straight-tie route and getting pretty burned out," he said. "I felt like a big part of me wasn't being expressed. Just doing medicine wasn't really me. There was something missing."
One Sunday, he spotted a newspaper article about Dr. Dean Edell, one of the nation's first media doctors. The article described how Dr. Edell "had been frustrated with medicine, took some time off, and gravitated back to medicine by being a media doctor," Dr. Silverstein recalled. "I said, 'That's interesting. Look at that guy,' because at the time I was considering taking some time off and this was a catalyst."