Laughter’s the best medicine – but please save me from clowns

New research suggests entertaining children in hospital aids their recovery, but I would run a mile if a clown approached

A study conducted at the Carmel Medical Centre in Israel, involving 51 children aged between two and 18, has shown that child patients who were visited by clowns (specially trained medical ones) made a faster recovery than those who weren’t. The group who had visits from a medical clown had a shorter stay in hospital and those on intravenous antibiotics could quit the drip a day early.
None of which comes as any surprise to me because if I was a kid in a hospital and was visited by a clown and further visits were then threatened, I would quickly wrench the drip out of my veins and get the hell out of there.
What could be more disconcerting, more worrying, more terrifying than being a little nipper, confined to a hospital bed and once some doctor has finished prodding you, putting a freezing cold stethoscope on your tummy, making you open your mouth and go “ahhh” and shoving a thermometer in your ear, a clown pops his head round the curtain? A man with a stark, white-painted face, fat red and extended lips, bold red cheeks, a big red false nose, a frizzy red wig and a silly little hat, waving and wiggling his white-gloved fingers and with an expression of exaggerated surprise on his face. 
“Thank you,” you’d tell the nurse, “I appear to have made a miraculous and speedy recovery.” And you scarper before the ghastly “medical clown” makes another appearance.
I’ve always loathed clowns, found them irredeemably creepy and have studiously avoided them alongside my long-term campaign to ban Morris dancing (that pagan, druidic horror that has the butterflies fluttering in my stomach the moment I hear the jingle of the bells attached to dancers’ shins).
Clowns are supposed to be the light relief at the circus; that other traumatic tradition. Why would anyone want to be sat in a stuffy circular tent with few routes of escape, run by a group of travelling scoundrels? Watching tortured animals performing tricks – on pain of whip – weirdos swinging around on wires and people standing on top of each other has little appeal. And the supposed light relief of the clown would only work if they were eaten by the lion.
Coulrophobia, the fear of clowns, is said to be irrational. Yet it seems to me to be entirely rational. Why else would Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, be a clown; a warped sadistic psychopath? There are creepy clowns in literature and in movies, from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado to Stephen King’s It and American Horror Story (“I’m a good person, Mama said so,” says evil clown Twisty). They drink chicken’s blood and, worse, pop balloons.
Laughter is the greatest tonic: free, uplifting, heart-pumping, vein-flowing stuff. But clowns are not funny. Although, note to Wes Streeting, they could be a great way of emptying at least the hypochondriacs from our hospitals.