Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Rx: Red noses

The clowns - er, professionals - in the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor say laughter really is the best medicine.

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published February 28, 2005

	[Times photo illustration: Patty Yablonski]

SAFETY HARBOR - At first glance, the middle-aged gent standing outside the Safety Harbor Resort and Spa looks much like any other tourist.

But the yellow Lab in a service-dog vest walking toward him does a double take. The dog's forehead wrinkles as it takes in what's on the end of the leash the man is holding: a giant plush hot dog, suspended in midair.

The Lab gives it a suspicious sniff, then looks up. When it sees the red foam nose in the middle of the man's face, the dog wags its tail.

Those red noses were all over the resort one February weekend, popped onto the schnozes of dozens of guests and even the desk clerks. They were just one of the visible signs of "Resort to Humor," the 2005 national conference of the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor.

Among the other signs: scads of balloons, squeaky horns, headbands with pink-flamingo antennae and helpful volunteer hosts in full clown regalia.

But this was no circus. About 250 folks came from across the United States and Canada to talk seriously about humor and its uses.

Not that they weren't laughing all the way. In an interactive theater workshop, nurses and therapists donned silly wigs and galloped around the room on stick horses. In a talk about cinematherapy, mental health workers snickered over the climactic ski-slope scene in Spellbound, with Ingrid Bergman as a psychotherapist in love with her possibly homicidal patient.

And out in the streets of Safety Harbor, a man in an alligator-head hat led hospice and hospital volunteers on a kind of clown guerrilla raid, tickling out giggles and stares all over downtown.

The Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor is an interdisciplinary network that includes professionals in business and education, and some of the conference's seminars focused on the use of humor in human resources, motivational training and sales, as well as in the classroom.

But many at the conference work in health care: doctors, nurses, therapists, nursing home caregivers. Those clown guides cheerfully escorting people to far-flung meeting rooms are volunteers in Morton Plant Mease Hospital's Clown Alley program.

One of them wears gigantic green-and-white golf shoes and billowing plus fours printed with golf clubs. Birdie Gertie (a.k.a. Shirley Gorrell of Clearwater), says, "I have a license to be silly. I'm retired now, and it's time for me to give back."

For conference participants in the health care field, it's all about laughter as a way to make people not just feel better but get better.

The notion of healing humor goes back at least as far as the Old Testament, in Proverbs 17:22: "A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones."

Some researchers date the modern humor therapy movement to the 1930s, when clowns visited hospitalized children during a polio epidemic.

In 1979, editor and author Norman Cousins made humor therapy a national topic with his bestselling book Anatomy of an Illness, about how he used laughter to help ease the pain of treatment for rheumatoid arthritis of the spine.

Also in the '70s, physician Hunter "Patch" Adams founded the Gesundheit Institute to promote the integration of traditional medicine with alternative practices, including humor therapy. His life was the basis of the 1998 Robin Williams movie Patch Adams.

Since then, research has shown that humor therapy can ease pain, improve the immune system, change brain chemistry and relieve stress for both patients and their caregivers, and it has gained respectability as part of many treatment programs. The corporate sponsor of the association's conference is Cancer Treatment Centers of America, a national chain of clinics and hospitals.

Patch Adams was an inspiration for Cheryl Ann Oberg. A professional clown from Calgary, Alberta, Oberg helped found the Canadian Association for Therapeutic Humor and is on the faculty of the World Laughter Tour, which trains "certified laughter leaders."

Oberg had worked as a clown for years, she says. "But a therapy clown was something I never dreamed of being" until she broke her back in a car accident.

After her recovery, she began visiting hospice patients with her sister, who is a chaplain. "I took along a bucket of red noses. It was amazing how people would change when I handed out those noses."

Oberg says she has seen humor therapy help many terminally ill patients cope. One particularly crusty hospice patient, whom she dubbed "John Wayne," resisted her efforts at first. But she kept coming back, gently trying to make him smile.

One day she tied a bunch of balloons to his wheelchair and took him for a ride. People they met began talking to him, and for the first time she saw him respond.

"When someone is terminally ill, people stop looking at them," Oberg says. "I've seen it so many times. They'll talk to the nurse when the patient is sitting right there."

John Wayne continued to respond, eventually reconnecting with his estranged family. The last time she saw him, Oberg says, he asked for a balloon horse. "He said he needed it to ride off into the sunset."

Being a therapy clown requires a different approach from entertainment clowning, Oberg says. Her appearance in therapy work is "very soft, very peoplelike. I used to be a full white face with a red wig. It wasn't the right thing."

Sitting at a lunch table with several women who also do therapy clowning, Oberg chats about the best balloon sizes for different animals, different red-nose styles and the problem of clown images in pop culture.

"Krusty on The Simpsons, I mean that is the most obnoxious clown ever. He drinks, he steals. That's an image we're up against."

Outside the meeting rooms, vendors proffer puppets, buttons and books, DVDs and CDs of songs, jokes and serious theory about humor therapy. At one booth, Jim Greiner of Clearwater sells clown supplies and gives away the punch lines that go with them.

A slip of paper offers "special ventriloquist instructions. . . . No one can see your lips move." The instructions? Hold the piece of paper in front of your mouth.

Greiner is used to the groans. "Can you imagine showing clowns how to be funny?" He has been a magician since he was in high school and works as an engineer for the city of Tampa. "All those enormous projects, you need something to balance the stress."

So he volunteers for the local chapter of AMBUCS, a national nonprofit organization that provides therapeutic tricycles for disabled kids and scholarships for therapists.

The clown supply booth is a fundraiser, as well as a chance to show off a few magic tricks. "It's more an obsessive disorder than a side business," Greiner says cheerfully.

The clown leading a "Feel Good Field Trip" into downtown Safety Harbor doesn't need any supplies. Danny Donuts is a hyperkinetic chatterbox in floppy green pants, a big green shirt, giant green plastic glasses and a hat shaped like an alligator's head.

Donuts is a clown, a standup comic, a musician and the proprietor of the Laughing Limo transport service in Chicago.

Gathering a group of conference participants around him in front of the resort, he mentions the guidelines for the field trip, which include "Stay grounded" and "Don't get arrested."

The point, he says, is to make people laugh, and also for participants to get over their fear of looking silly. Some people will respond. Others won't. Don't push it.

People respond right away. Donuts is wearing that outrageous costume, one woman with him wears half-a-dozen feather boas and a tall top hat, Birdie Gertie is there in her goofy-golf glory. A woman walks up to them and says very seriously, "Are you clowns?"

Others get the spirit. A dapper man in a dark suit, wraparound shades and a white brush cut walks by, wearing a red foam nose. "Yes, this is your nose, and you're not getting it back," he says crisply.

Another man in a park is carrying a computer keyboard under his arm. "What's with the keyboard?" Donuts asks.

"I couldn't afford a laptop," the guy shoots right back.

The roaming clowns find a perfect target in a pizza place. Behind a big window, a woman is eating lunch.

Donuts pulls a big sad face. "She's in prison. Let's visit her." They pull up chairs and begin to mime a phone conversation. "How's the food in prison?"

Behind the glass, Michele Brent of Tampa jumps right into the game, picking up her imaginary phone. She makes a face at her lunch, shakes her head. Has she met Martha Stewart? She laughs.

One of the clowns says, "Ask her where she hid the money."

Brent shakes her head emphatically, mimes zipping her lip.

As the clowns move on, conference participant Joye Swisher of Largo runs into the restaurant to talk to Brent. "I recruited her!" Swisher says, coming out with a card.

Swisher is volunteer coordinator for Hospice of the Florida Suncoast, and she has worked with its Smile Team for five years. "Hospice therapy is different from the other kinds of therapy," she says. "They're not getting better.

"But if you can get them to laugh, and if you can get their families to laugh, it really breaks through the barriers."

She's in scrubs instead of clown gear, but she carries a floppy plastic hammer shaped like the ones doctors use to check reflexes.

"I'm looking for your funny bone," she says as she hammers it over someone's shoulder or knee. It makes a sound that's kind of a cross between a dog's squeaky toy and Curly from the Three Stooges. It works every time.

Back in the pizza place, Brent has several textbooks spread out on the table. She's a yoga instructor and is studying to become a massage therapist.

Why was she so comfortable jumping into play with the clowns? Why not look the other way and finish her lunch in peace?

She grins. "Life is too short not to laugh."

For information about the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor, go to www.aath.org Colette Bancroft can be reached at 727 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com

[Last modified February 25, 2005, 13:00:08]