A while back, I decided to rewatch Scrubs alongside listening to the podcast Fake Doctors, Real Friends, in which the series’ two male lead actors watched the show themselves and discussed their memories of it. Fake Doctors, Real Friends finished reviewing episodes this year. Sitcoms don’t have the central place in American culture that they used to, but they’re still an interesting example of more or less contemporary humor. So how do they work from a wordplay perspective?
Viewed through that lens, the most obvious wordplay is the characters’ names. A TV character’s name should be chosen with care: it influences how we see them. The lead character in Scrubs is John Dorian, nicknamed J.D.—and in medicine, J.D. stands for a juris doctor degree, as opposed to a full M.D. Though J.D. evolves a lot over the series’ nine years, he’s rarely addressed as “John.”
Doctor Cox, J.D,’s mentor-in-denial, whipsaws between blistering rage, sadistic mischief, and withering contempt. In other words, he often acts like a real bag of…[penises].
The series did a lot to subvert traditional gender roles. In line with that was its choice of female characters’ names—Carla, a feminization of Carl, and Jordan and Elliot, names more often used for men. One plot used Elliot’s name as a McGuffin: when facing a patient who didn’t take women doctors seriously, Elliot asked the unnamed janitor to use her name and recommend the treatments she would:
Some of that subversion came in forms that wouldn’t play as well today, especially Dr. Cox’s casual habit of referring to J.D. by whatever girl’s name occurs to him in the moment. His most frequent nickname for J.D., though, is “Newbie,” which reinforces the message “J.D.” already conveys.
Cox wasn't the only insulting nicknamer in the series. In the pilot, Dr. Kelso—who was close to a villain in the early seasons, though he mellowed with time—puts a bow right on the series title.
“Scrubs” is also slang for insignificant, unskilled, or contemptible people, and that’s a big part of the series in a nutshell—it’s about the underdogs of medicine, the ones who aren’t sure whether they’ll really make it. The show’s length did complicate that theme somewhat: by the later seasons, characters like J.D. and Elliot had outgrown some of their early insecurities. The last season tried to shift focus to a newer group of “scrubs,” and had it continued, it would have kept rotating the cast.
One of the other bits of wordplay you probably wouldn't see today is the name of J.D.’s best friend, Christopher Turk—known as Turk (sometimes misnamed Turkleton).
The show’s creators seemed to want to highlight the interracial friendship by giving Turk a name that connoted Blackness—a risky strategy at best, like naming someone “Minnie Orrity.” It wasn’t the most tone-deaf name they could’ve chosen—“Turk” used to have offensive connotations, but those were largely forgotten by 2001. However, today’s audiences would associate “Turk” more with Turkic or Arabic ancestry. Turk has no connection to that heritage—or if he does, he doesn’t much care.
Still, if that name choice seems a little out of step with the language of today, the show also helped bring about the language of today, like the playful portmanteau bromance. Scrubs didn’t invent it or even feature it in dialogue, but discussion of Turk and J.D.’s deep bond seemed to popularize it more than anything else. Like a lot of portmanteaus that start out as tongue-in-cheek, it’s now recognized as a “real” word. No joke.