New York City Treating The Funny Bone

Dr. Stubs pokes his head into the hospital room of five-year-old Dorothy. "I hope I'm not bothering you," he says before entering. At her bedside, he pulls several crumpled sheets of legal paper from his worn leather bag, digs for a pencil stub and begins his examination:

"Are you married?" "No," the patient replies. "Any children?" She shakes her head. "Does your nose ever turn red?" She furrows her eyebrows thoughtfully and answers, "Yes, sometimes." "Aha," says Stubs. "Does it turn red when it's cold outside?" The girl thinks for a moment, then says, decisively, no.

Though he makes rounds in hospitals including Babies Hospital, a unit of New York City's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, Stubs is clearly no ordinary doctor. To those who witness his offbeat bedside manner, Stubs' true trade is obvious. He's a clown, a founding member of the one-ring Big Apple Circus. But to Stubs, a.k.a. Michael Christensen, working with young hospital patients is serious business.

"Have you ever had a how-long-can-you-go-without-laughing test?" he asks Dorothy, continuing his routine examination. "No," she says, eyes widening. Stubs takes a large windup clock from his bag and lets it drop to the floor. Dorothy giggles. "You only lasted about four seconds," he says, feigning disappointment.

"Want to try again?" She holds her breath as the second hand advances and bites her cheeks while Stubs tickles her with a paper flower. But when Stubs gives the girl's mother a rubber clown nose in a red-nose "transplant," the tiny patient erupts with laughter. For a few moments, at least, Dorothy's mind is off the pain and trauma of being ill.

Since Christensen, 43, started the Clown Care Unit at Babies Hospital four years ago, the project has grown to involve 25 trained clowns who make rounds at eight New York City hospitals. Two or three days a week, bands of these performers, dressed in mock hospital garb and bearing such names as Dr. Comfort, Dr. EBDBD and Disorderly Gordoon, visit ailing children and their families. The clowns' purpose: to alleviate the fear and confusion of hospital stays and provide bright moments with humorous routines, such as "drawing blood" -- with red crayons -- and giving funny-bone examinations. Christensen has found the C.C.U. so fulfilling that he quit performing with the Big Apple Circus last fall to devote full attention to improving and expanding the project.

Why would a clown give up the big top for hospital rounds? To Christensen, the C.C.U. is more than work; it's a calling. "This project came out of an unconscious place in myself," he explains. "After going through those feelings of loss and of grief around my brother's death five years ago, this gave me a feeling of celebration and joy, of healing after his loss. Call it love and caring, God, a higher consciousness -- whatever -- I want to give my life to that."