A "Travesty Tonight": Satiric Skits in Medicine

^A "Travesty Tonight": Satiric Skits in Medicine" Anne Burson-Tolpin Something chaotic, Something psychotic Perhaps erotic at this Travesty tonight! Something that's lewd Something that's crude Sit back and watch Your coUeagues get screwed! Nothing contrite Nothing poUte It is the staff We plan to indict Something abusive Nothing elusive We'll try to give you some insight Comedy tomorrow, travesty tonight!1 Thus began the skit put on by the 1974 graduating class of Midwestern University Medical School. Over the course of the evening, the students fulfilled their song's promise, puncturing the egos of faculty, nurses, and fellow students with arrow-sharp parodies of Ufe at the * The need for anonymity prevents my listing by name either my informants or the schools they attended. However, I would like to thank all those who contributed material on skits over the years. Portions of the fieldwork for this paper were done under a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I owe special thanks to Mark Tolpin. Literature and Medicine 12, no. 1 (Spring 1993) 81-110 © 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 82 SATIRIC SKITS IN MEDICINE medical center. Although a few feathers were ruffled, most of the audience thoroughly enjoyed themselves, and many of them rehashed the skit's best jokes the next day at work. Such performances are put on annually by students and house staff at medical centers across the country. Drawing directly on the folklore and vernacular culture of the hospital, skits present an acute—if jaundiced —view of the way their presenters see themselves, their patients, and their environment. Skits are, in effect, cultural critiques written by "the natives," public enactments of the uneasiness felt by their producers and audiences over the problematic aspects of modern medical practice. In this essay, I will examine medical skits, placing them in the context of similar traditions outside of medicine, describing their general form, and then focusing on one production in particular. I will show how the contents of these skits reflect both local circumstances and issues of concern to the broader medical community, and I will then discuss their meanings to the institutions and individuals involved in their creation . My analysis is based primarily on fieldwork conducted between 1973 and 1983. In the course of this research, I obtained audiotapes of seven skits, dating from 1966 to 1983, and fragmentary information concerning perhaps a dozen others. Aside from topical references (for example , to military service in Vietnam in the 1966 skit), I found no major changes in the skits over the fifteen-year period they represent. However, these skits antedate all but the infancy of the aids epidemic, and it is likely that the fears and ethical issues raised by HlV have been reflected in the content of more recent skits. This difference notwithstanding, I suspect current skits are much the same as those in my collection. Skits in the Larger Context Parodie and satiric skits are not unique to medicine but are a form of folk drama found in many different types of communities and cultures. Skits are related, on the one hand, to amateur theatrical productions of elite dramas and, on the other, to carnival and similar festivals containing strong elements of parody and satire. They differ from elite drama in that they draw on the materials of high art but are adapted to fit a particular group's concerns. These adaptations may be so specific and esoteric that much of the final result is unintelligible to outsiders. Skits have a more fully developed dramatic form than carnival and other public events but share their reliance on techniques of symbolic inversion to mock the established social order. Anne Burson-Tolpin 83 As Barbara A. Babcock notes, symbolic inversion "is central to the Uterary notions of irony, parody, and paradox." She defines symbolic inversion as "any act of expressive behavior which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values, and norms be they Unguistic, Uterary or artistic, religious, or social and political."2 Examples of symbolic inversion include transvestism and other forms of temporary role or status reversal, such as students playing...