Health, Heartache, and Humor: A Practical Framework for Approaching Humor in Serious Illness

Despite the pain and suffering that often accompany serious illness, humor can play a rich and meaningful role as part of multifaceted patient-clinician interactions. Patients often use humor to communicate about their values, to bring psychological release through levity, or to encode topics that they may find uncomfortable discussing directly. While patients should be allowed broad leeway to use humor in their communication with providers, clinicians attempting to embrace humor-particularly in the context of serious illness-do so with significant inherent risks involved. This article explores the impact of humor in clinical interactions, discusses historical categorizations of humor, and proposes a practical framework for guiding clinicians who engage with humor at the bedside with a goal of helping them cultivate insight and self-awareness as they navigate this fraught and joyful aspect of serious illness communication.