Lab coats and comedy

Lab Coats has a long history in the annals of comedy. Someone long ago decided that a doctor in a lab coat could be as funny as a clown in makeup or a straight man in a suit.

This is especially true for animated shows. For decades, animation shows have played doctors in the role of comic fodder, usually as slightly inept professionals who are always there with a funny line or comic diagnosis. For a perfect example of this type of character, you don’t have to look any further than Julius Hibbert, the resident physician at Springfield Hospital on the hit animated show The Simpsons.

Modeled after Bill Cosby’s character on the Cosby Show, the creators even went as far as giving Dr. Hibbert a pension for colorful sweaters and kids that resemble Cosby’s progeny on screen. Dr. Hibbert is an intelligent man, although he tends to laugh at even the most tragic news. Most of his comedy comes from a comic diagnosis or witty lines, which vary from person to person. He is a doctor, but he also appears to be a pediatrician and a surgeon (he has operated on Homer Simpson on several occasions). He seems to be a good father, quite ethical (although a tool for the HMO circuit) and has hairstyles that reflect famous black actors depending on the decade in which you see him (dreadlocks, a Mr. T flattop, etc.).

In Family Guy, the resident physician is a far more inept physician than Mr. Hibbert. His joke is that when he gives a diagnosis, he always brings up whatever bad things he has in mind before getting to the real information (ex: when he tells Peter Griffin what his cancer test says, he starts off by saying “No, no, this is not very good … “. After a short pause, she holds up a drawing her son made” This is nothing like me “). He seems to know what he’s doing, although he tends to be too stupid to be credible in most cases (reaching into a used needle thinking that’s where he keeps his rubber gloves).

It’s not often that you see a lobster-like alien in a lab coat, but that’s exactly what you would see if you were a fan of Futurama, which aired on FOX in 2000-2003. The running joke with Zoidberg, aside from the fact that he was broke and … ummm … had claws … was that he was a terrible doctor who usually misdiagnosed or, because it was the future, cured them in strange ways. Frankly, he was hilarious and the latest in a long line of funny doctors on animated television shows.