Healthy Humor — Using laughter for good.

Who We Are

We see the child, not the illness.

Healthy Humor is a nonprofit arts organization whose professional performers create moments of joy, wonder, laughter and comfort for hospitalized children and all others who are most in need. Healthcare clowning is a non-pharmacological clinical intervention: it lowers procedural anxiety, improves compliance, and gives a child back some authorship of the day. Our founders have led this field for more than four decades.

Two Red Nose Docs at a patient's bedside.

A small child in a hospital gown reaches for a bubble blown by a Red Nose Doc in a ward corridor.

Joy Is Medicine

A Red Nose Doc plays a ukulele at the bedside as a toddler in a hospital gown reaches out to touch the strings.

Red Nose Docs

Flagship program

Red Nose Docs are professional performers, trained in clinical practice, who work in partnership with hospital care teams. They arrive in pairs, check in with nurses and child life staff before starting their rounds, and adapt each visit to what that child can take part in that day.

The work is improvised but never casual. A visit can defuse a procedure, restore a sense of control, and reframe a memory that would otherwise be defined by fear.

Our Red Nose Docs conduct Clown Rounds at our partner hospitals wherever children are receiving care — from oncology, intensive care, and other inpatient units to emergency departments, outpatient clinics, and everywhere in between.

Explore Red Nose Docs

Additional programming