Medical memes: Humour preferences among medical students

Medical humour within the medical community is a diverse and contextualised phenomenon that includes 'difficult' material that is cognitively challenging to non-insiders. This paper addresses the under-researched topic of medical students' humour and its link to medical identity formation, by exploring how the humour preferences of medical students from different cohorts regarding medical memes reflects changes in their medical identity at different stages of their studies. A total of 216 medical students rated 50 medically related memes of different difficulty levels targeting doctors, patients, students and other medical issues. The results reveal that when comparing cohorts earlier in their studies vs. later on, doctor- and student-targeted memes become less and less popular while the popularity of memes about patients and other medical issues remain stable. Overall, students find memes about doctors the least funny. Simple memes also were funnier for students early in their studies compared with those approaching graduation. Our findings indicate that students most strongly identify with student and doctor memes, as these concern their current and future selves most strongly. The fact that medical identity plays a significant role in medical humour preferences may indicate that students find insider humour emotionally bonding. Our study also shows the emotional influence of humour processing (represented by targets) can have a greater impact on students' humour preferences than the cognitive aspect (represented by difficulty levels).