What is Clown-Doctoring?

A clown-doctor is a specially trained professional artist who works in a healthcare facility providing therapeutic humour to patients. They are not simply entertainers – they serve as an integral component of the healthcare delivery process.

You see, laughter is good for you. The clown-doctors prescribe doses of humour to every patient and then, based on caring and empathy, administer it with song, improvisational play, and loads of laughter!

Although clown-doctoring is not truly a “therapy” in the traditional sense, the effects of humour has been shown to be “therapeutic,” and patients experience multiple benefits. That is why many similar organizations refer to clown-doctors as “therapeutic clowns.”

 

 





Using their unique set of smile-making skills, clown–doctors:

• Combine interpersonal and communication skills with improvisational performance
  
• Check funny bones, repair inverted smiles, give patients an “addalaughtome”
  
• Work in pairs, wear a red nose and use a minimal amount of make-up
  
• Wear a white lab coat and are referred to as "doctor" (ie: Dr. BB, Dr. Haven’t-A-Clue, Dr. Tilly-Tom-Tom) to help make the institutional garment and the medical staff more "friendly" and less intimidating - especially for children
  
• Have a unique personality and name identified by a distinctive trademark connected to that name
  
• Carry minimal props (“empty pocket clowning”)
  
• Are verbal, use music and song extensively and communicate using gesture, sound, language ranging from silence and simple gesture to loud and gregarious dialogue
  
• Play in a wide range of styles – from quiet meditative music or sitting quietly at a bedside, to loud and boisterous productions of Shakespeare’s plays or Tchaikovsky's ballets that involve anyone in close proximity at that time
  
• Focus as much on the family members and healthcare workers as the patient

 






Clown-doctors attend specifically to the psycho-social needs of the hospitalised child or adult. They parody hospital routines to help patients adapt and adjust to their surroundings. They also distract from and demystify painful or frightening procedures. The atmosphere of fun and laughter can help the patient forget about their illness and the stress for a time.

Clown-doctors use their performance techniques, and their relations with the staff to treat patients with doses of fun that help them deal with the range of emotions they may experience while in hospital: fear, seclusion, anxiety, loneliness, boredom.

 

Clowning in and for health care has been around for many centuries. However, it was Dr. Patch Adams, in the later half of the 20thcentury, who developed research and showcased how the body actually responds in a healing way to humour, bringing global attention and recognition to the value of humour in health care.

In 1986 Big Apple Circus’s Clown Care Unit emerged in New York City at the hands of Michael Christiansen. Clown Care Unit was the first clown doctoring organization worldwide that integrated professional performers in a health care setting to promote wellness through humour, physical theatre and music. There are now over 20 clown-doctoring organizations worldwide on several continents, focusing on the entire range of human experience and working with all ages of life.

In Canada, we now have several organizations and individuals providing clowning in health care settings. In 1986, the first therapeutic clowning program was established by Karen Ridd as Robo (Winnipeg), who worked with hospitalized children. Fools for Health (Windsor), Dr. Clown (Montreal), Paul Hooson (Vancouver), and The Therapeutic Clown Program at SickKids (Toronto) are a handful of the established programs that Jest for Joy (Lower Mainland, BC) is pleased to join with in delivering the service of clowning in health care.  

Fools for Health, was established in Windsor Ontario in 2001. Fools for Health was created by Professor Bernie Warren, PhD, who had been researching clowning in health care for many years, and had visited the established and esteemed Le Rire Medicin in Paris. He appreciated the work and realized with his experience and background, he could create a similar program in Canada. Fools for Health is Jest for Joy's official mentor program.