Idioms with the meaning of “health - ill health” in the Russian phraseology do not take a significant place. Most of these expressions are phraseological units with the meaning of mental state of a person. There are are also numerous phraseological units with the meaning of “death”, only 4% of the considered idioms contain the word “heart” in their structure and only 1% are the names of diseases or their symptoms.

The article deals with the potential of phraseological units in the creation of humorous statements by means of language pun. The research is based on the fiction about doctors. The analysis identifies such ways to use phraseological units as literalness, change in syntactic function, substitution of the component,meaning broadening, etc.