Humor in intern retreats: scrubbing away the blues.

Humor in everyday practice has been shown to reduce work stress and increase efficiency. We aimed to study the effect of humor on interns for which we employed humor in one of the intern retreats and later asked the interns to rate the value of each retreat. Pre- and post- retreat mood states were also surveyed. The majority of interns recommended that humorous intern retreats be used in the coming years. A trend towards improvement in depression scores was also noticed.