The Best of Wits End: Medical Humor at Its Brainiest

Ellner, Harold J

Harold J. Ellner, M.D., a retired urologist, practiced in Richland, Washington. During and after this career, he published several articles dealing with both medical and non-medical humor. Some of these have appeared in Verbatim, SPELL, Northwest medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. He teaches at the local community college, volunteers in the English as a Second Language program, and for many years has been editor of the Rotary club newsletter. Creating and judging The Wits End contests in Diversion Magazine constituted a second career of sorts during a fifteen-year span. For several decades, the last page of Diversion, the leisure magazine for physicians, held a monthly contest that required doctors to come up with puns, one-liners, and other crimes against the English language. The entrants' best and funniest responses are offered in this volume.