The Humor Code (31 page)

In other words, we're in the poorest part of the poorest part of a country that's fairly poor to begin with. And right now, this situation is worse than ever.

Stomping down these dusty streets, something happens to me. Maybe it's the beat of the parade music, or the infectious glee of 100 marching fools. Maybe it's the delighted smiles of the barefoot children who flock to us, or the shy grins and waves from the adults who peer down from the porches of their homes. Maybe it's just heatstroke. For whatever the reason, I begin to clown.

I traipse past throngs of onlookers, slapping high fives left and right. I chase children beneath the buildings, leaping over the sewage ditches and weaving through support beams. In the hazy afternoon light, I dance with other clowns as a loudspeaker jerry-rigged to a motor taxi blasts the clown expedition's theme song: an up-tempo tune about washing your hands to prevent dying from dengue fever. At one point, a little girl in a purple shirt takes my hand, and she never lets go. We march through Belén, side by side, and eventually I'm carrying her in my arms.

When it's all over, when the parade music wraps up and the purple-shirted girl scampers away with a smile and a wave, Pete looks
at me and grins. “Your dad training is coming out.” Pete, in his goofy floppy hat and shiny red nose, didn't do too badly himself.

“That place came alive,” he says as we trudge back to the hotel. “You see the difference, with all the smiles and laughter.” On the other hand, he adds, “What a monumental problem this is. You need millions of dollars to help Belén. You essentially have to move the whole city.”

“It's worse than I ever expected,” he concludes. How can a bunch of clowns ever hope to make a difference?

Clowning in the
Amazon, it turns out, is like summer camp—if summer camp came with a moderate risk of malaria.

There are “clownings” all over Belén and other spots around the city, including an old-folks' home, a shelter for abandoned children, even a local prison (don't bring your “stabby” toys, prison-bound clowns are warned). Some activities involve teaching kids how to hula-hoop, make shadow puppets, and bang out rhythms on plastic-bucket drums. Others take the form of door-to-door clown interventions, hammering the importance of throwing away trash and tossing out stagnant water through pratfalls and squirt-gun gags. Many clownings are just about gathering up a group of street kids and having fun.

While most of the 100-clown squad are in their twenties, many among this assortment of college students, social workers, nurses, and professional circus performers are still relative old-timers, coolly reminiscing about Belén escapades from years past. (“Remember that time Levi and David had stolen earrings planted in their luggage in El Salvador and had to spend a week in prison before paying off the right officials? Those were the days!”) Others are newcomers, timid and awkward, trying to find their standing among the clown pecking order.

Complicating matters are the different clown styles among the group, far more than we knew existed. The South American clowns, from professional squads in Peru and Argentina, are practiced and polished, with carefully tailored jester costumes and refined routines.
They're the New York Yankees of clowns. And then there's us, the ragtag Americans under Patch Adams.

For the Gesundheit clowns, many of whom have never clowned before, there are no crash courses in buffooning, no how-to handbooks or ironclad rules. Patch doesn't believe in it. “It's too restricting,” he says. “I don't want any mystique about it. I want everybody to be a love revolutionary.” He's less like the group's leader and more like a very bad influence, delegating logistics to others so he can focus on the work of play. After growing up as a troubled, bullied kid, Patch says that one day in high school, “I decided to serve humanity and be happy the rest of my life.” He's been clowning every day since then—clowning through med school, clowning during the twelve-year operation of the Gesundheit! Clinic, and now clowning all over the world.

He's doing so in Iquitos and Belén, clowning everywhere we look. One moment, he's eating lunch at a ceviche restaurant wearing underpants on his head. The next, he's sauntering down the street sporting a face-distorting set of false teeth beneath his handlebar mustache. Later, he's chasing after squealing children with his half-gray, half-blue ponytail flapping in the wind, stopping only to wrap up elderly ladies in big, sweaty hugs.

During what turns out to be one of many long, rambling conversations I have with Patch, I discover formal clown training isn't the only thing he doesn't believe in. He doesn't believe in the cold, corporate machinations of Western medicine, or much else about capitalism. He doesn't believe in computers, instead responding to each of the hundreds of monthly letters he gets by hand. He doesn't believe in organized religion, preferring the more basic spirituality of love and compassion. He doesn't believe in traditional family structures, figuring we'd all be better off living in communes. And he doesn't believe that humanity has much chance of long-term survival. “Nothing I've studied suggests we will stop our extinction soon,” he tells me, scratching at the underpants he's wearing on his head. “Humans are an embarrassment.”

There's one other thing Patch doesn't believe in. “I never said laughter is the best medicine,” he declares the first time we talk. Instead, he believes the key to a healthy life is connected, loving
relationships with anyone and everyone, and he sees humor as the perfect tool to break down the social mores, boundaries, and anxieties that often get in the way. After all, he points out, clowns are all about shaking things up: “The jester is the only person in the king's court who can call the king an asshole.”

It's true. Clowns, like comedians, are outsiders and rebels. All over the world and through most of civilization, clowns, jesters, tricksters, and picaros have stood apart from the crowd, with full license to break all the rules. They can spit in the face of conformity. They can say what no one else dares to say.

Maybe that's why in the United States, the image of the clown is now often associated with the dark and the scary, a staple of haunted-house rides and serial killer stories. After all, the chaotic and disorderly nature of clowns can be frightening. (It doesn't help that in the 1970s, two different amateur clown performers—Paul Kelly, aka “Weary Willie,” and John Wayne Gacy, aka “Pogo the Clown”—killed multiple people.)
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A few years ago, a study at the University of Sheffield in England found that 250 children, aged four to sixteen, all believed clown images were too scary for hospital décor.
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Of course, there's a difference between a clown painting on the wall when you're trying to sleep in a hospital ward and a real clown face peeking around your door during visiting hours, wanting to know if you want to play. Maybe that's why a follow-up study at a British children's hospital found that children, their parents, doctors, and nurses all agreed that clown interventions at the facility were beneficial.
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The rebellious nature of clowning is likely why, maybe for the first time ever, my wife is wrong. I'm not a bad clown. I throw myself into games of hide-and-seek and jump-rope contests, play peekaboo with giggling babies, and chase rumbling taxis down the street like a maniac. After one of the clownings, Gesundheit director John Glick approaches me. “You've got it, man,” he says with a grin. “You are a regular Patch.” I soak up the compliment, not minding that I'm drenched in sweat and probably sewage, that my mouth feels like it's been sandblasted, that I look like a fool. Jeff Semmerling was right: the red nose gave license to my clown, stripping away all the hang-ups I've accumulated over the years.

The best part of my clown costume, the biggest hit among the youth of Belén, is the clown tie loaned to me by my son Gabriel. The children never tire of tugging on it, of using it to lead me around like I'm a pet buffoon on a leash. Their love of this game makes sense. These children are some of the most put-upon, least-powerful people in the world. And thanks to a clown costume, they have complete power over a grown white American man. Their world is turned upside down.

Pete gets into the action, too, albeit from a different direction. Because these projects are all about clowns letting loose their inner child in environments that are none too hospitable to any kind of children, someone has to be there to look out for them, to make sure they don't fall into sewage pits or pass out from dehydration or get kidnapped by Amazonian gangsters. Someone who thrives on responsibility and order, someone who's always thinking about what might go wrong. So Pete retires his red nose and becomes one of the civilian guides assigned to watch over the clowns.

Pete comes along as one of the civilian guides when we travel to a mental hospital on the outskirts of Iquitos one afternoon. While most of us clown around in a tree-dotted courtyard, dancing and playing catch with giggling patients, Pete shadows a blue-haired Argentinian clown named Ramiro as he explores the hospital's rudimentary living quarters. In a bare, dingy room, Ramiro finds an old woman cowering in her bed, covers drawn over her face. As Pete watches from a window, Ramiro sits on the edge of her bed and begins playing his harmonica. After a while, he stops. “Move your foot if you like the music,” he says in Spanish. A foot wiggles beneath the blanket. He continues to play.

This continues for 30, 40 minutes—Pete watching from the window, Ramiro playing his harmonica, the woman lying in her bed. As time passes, a face emerges from beneath the blanket. Finally, when it's time to go, the woman rises from the bed and clasps Ramiro in a long, silent hug.

Later, when we all meet for a debriefing session at an open-air bar near our hotel, Pete raises his hand to speak. “I didn't know a lot about clowns before I came here. But I saw a lot of beautiful things
today.” His voice cracks with emotion. “What you're doing is really important.”

A big, matronly Argentinian clown named Lorena leaps from her seat and wraps Pete in her arms.
“Bienvenidos al grupo de payasos,”
she says as she squeezes him tight. “Welcome to our clown family.”

About halfway through
the trip, Pete and I realize we're having a lot of fun. And that doesn't make any sense.

We're not grumbling about the lack of fresh vegetables in our repetitive meals of fried fish and hamburgers. Or the
National Geographic
–worthy world of critters that infest our beds each night. Or that our hotel room is draped with sweat-damp clothes that never fully dry in the sticky heat.

“If this were just the two of us . . .” I say to Pete one morning.

“. . . we'd be freakin' miserable,” he replies, finishing my sentence.

But it's not just the two of us—we're surrounded by people even more crazily upbeat than we are. The clowns here are not at all like the hammy, squirting-flower bozos we'd imagined, the sort of clock-punching performers who transform into beaten-down old men once their clown shifts are over. Instead, they're as energetic and loving and generous as a company of young evangelicals, never ceasing to clown around with everyone they see. So why aren't we all miserable? Maybe it's because we're too busy clowning around to focus on how miserable we should be. Humor and coping, after all, seem to go hand in hand. Successful humor inspires all sorts of positive feelings and emotions, which can act as a psychological buffer when things go wrong. Not only that, but as we've learned, humor is all about shifting one's perspective, reassessing situations, and, as Pete would say, transforming violations into benign violations. So by cracking jokes about our Peruvian bedbugs and gross clown clothes, we'd found the perfect way to keep our spirits up, not to mention defuse what would otherwise be a total bummer.

Over the years, several compelling studies have suggested that these theories aren't just theories, that humor and coping really are intertwined. In one especially touching experiment, researchers
interviewed a group of widowers six months after the death of their spouses. Those able to smile and laugh about their marriage during this time of lingering sadness had fewer problems with grief and depression in the years that followed.
¹⁰

There's also evidence connecting humor and coping from the USS
Pueblo
incident in North Korea, courtesy of all those POWs flashing Hawaiian peace signs at their captors. When researchers examined the 82 survivors once they'd been released from captivity, they found that those who best handled the ordeal relied on a variety of defense mechanisms such as faith, denial, and, yes, humor.
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This research is a step in the right direction, says Pete, but when it comes to data like this from the real world, there's a hitch: none of it proves that humor is a coping mechanism. These studies are correlational. It's unclear whether the humor helped people cope with their hardships, or whether the people who were already better equipped to cope with adversity had an easier time joking about their problems.

That's why psychology researchers are turning to wonderfully devious lab experiments to untangle the relationship between humor and coping. In one study, researchers had participants narrate a thirteen-minute safety video featuring dramatized versions of grisly wood-mill accidents. Those asked to come up with a humorous narration reported less stress afterward than those who described it seriously, and readings of skin conductance, heart rate, and skin temperature suggested the comic narrators were less physiologically stressed, too. (Unfortunately, the subsequent paper didn't include examples of how the narrators came up with quips about industrial ripsaws.)
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Not surprisingly, sadistic research like this appeals to Pete. He's especially interested in what he calls humorous complaining. As we know, tragedies big and small can lead to comedy, so humor can be a common outcome of stuff worth grumbling about—a missed flight, an unfair parking ticket, a crummy meal at a high-priced restaurant. Pete, in collaboration with graduate students Christina Kan and Caleb Warren, scrutinized hundreds of business ratings on Yelp.com. They found that negative reviews, especially those accompanying one-star ratings, were rated by other consumers to be
significantly funnier than positive reviews. But Pete believes griping in a humorous way is not only natural, it's beneficial. It makes the complainer feel better than if they just grumbled negatively, and it makes other people feel better about the complainer, too. Pete is hoping to prove this by subjecting people to painful situations and having them complain humorously about it. While research is still in progress, all I know is that when Pete had me stick my hand in a bucket of ice water for five minutes, all the going-down-with-the-
Titanic
jokes I cracked didn't stop my right pinkie from feeling numb for weeks.
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