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.