“I’m just a person”: Comedy as a Health Equity Teaching Tool in the Health Professional Writing Course

Undergraduate pre-health students are primarily trained in the sciences, and that preparation misses an opportunity to attend to the element of care in medicine. Many premedical students who pursue scientific degrees must participate in low or unpaid internships and extramural activities to learn about care and strengthen their applications for medical school. As such, health equity training is largely inaccessible to poor or otherwise under-resourced undergraduate students. The purpose of this dissertation study is to first test the value of introducing health equity concepts in the premedical writing course at a large R1 institution in California. Second, the study also tests the value of using stand-up comedy performances in which performers share their health histories on stage as a tool for teaching health equity concepts. For the study, I created a writing sequence for three sections of 25 students each in my Writing in the Health Professions course. My curriculum was led by a unit in which students consumed stand-up comedy performances by Tig Notaro and Ali Wong and health and medical scholarship that corresponded to patient groups and health disparities that the performers represented. Results indicated that the Writing in the Health Professions course was an appropriate space to teach health equity and stand-up comedy performances were appropriate teaching tools. The results suggest that instructors of writing and professional communication can take up the curriculum and effectively teach it, with some caveats. Future instructors of this curriculum must engage in ongoing professional development in health equity, adjust stand-up comedy performances so that performers address current and relevant health disparity issues, and respond to their local institutions’ assessment and curricular requirements.