Clowns on the Front Lines: Inside Patch Adams' Mission of Hope
Clowns on the Front Lines: Inside Patch Adams' Mission of Hope
By JESSE MYERSON | Oct 28, 2013 AT 01:45PM
Patch Adams has three Syrian refugees in his underwear. Allow me to explain: For the past 30 years, the 68-year-old physician-clown – famously played by Robin Williams in the 1998 film bearing his name – has spent the majority of his time as a global activist. His goals include overturning capitalism, obtaining funding for his free healthcare organization, the Gesundheit! Institute – and getting as many people as possible into The World's Largest Underwear, which he always has in tow. The size 100 "whiteys" are anything but "tighty," a fact well-known to their previous occupants, which include the vice president of Ecuador, the president of Costa Rica and a great number of fatally sick, devastatingly impoverished or violently displaced people from 71 countries around the world.
For a week in October, I was one of 20 volunteer clowns who joined Patch on a tour of Jordan's many refugee camps to perform the good doctor's signature care work, complete with clown shoes and whoopee cushions. The underwear comes out at Rabeit Na'eam, a rocky, desolate refugee camp near the Syrian border, whose inhabitants live in canvas tents bearing the logo of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees and very little else. There is some disagreement among the camp's inhabitants about whether these austere conditions constitute a step up from the ethnic-sectarian factional warfare that began in Syria in March 2011 and drove them from their homes.
The children of the camp wriggle and shriek with bliss as they watch the underwear march, which features a song to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club theme: "Underwear!/Underwear!/Wherever you go, you're in your underwear!"
Patch's philosophy holds that fun is vital in healing mass traumas and creating wellness in the people who live them. "I can remember, in the Bosnian camps, a teenager telling the story of when people forced his family out of the house and then made him watch them kill them all," Patch says. "What does one do with that?" His answer is to spread love to the suffering through clowning. "Clowning is a trick to get love close," he is fond of saying. "I can hug 99 percent of people in the first second of contact, if I'm in my clown character. The clown assumes your humanity. It assumes that, whatever trauma you've had, you can still love yourself."
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