'What do you call a frog illegally parked?"

(Wait for it.)

"Toad."

Antoinette Skerski, 90, groaned - and not because she was a cardiac patient at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

"That was a bad one," she told the joker, Mike Quartuccio, whose garish wig looked like a Krusty the Clown castoff.

Six other clowns, squished into the small room, began administering RJT (Rapid Joke Therapy), which they warned could cause nausea.

"What is Beethoven's favorite fruit?"

Sing it: "BA NA NA NA AA."

"Good one," said Skerski of Medford Lakes, her arm bruised from intravenous needles.

Everyone knows that laughter - preferably the "genuine belly laughter" that Norman Cousins self-prescribed - is the best medicine.

But the Jefferson medical students who double as Clowns for Medicine have found that grins, guffaws, and groans are good, too. As part of the current generation of "healing with humor" practitioners, they are less about hilarity, more about humanity.

Each Friday evening, their goal is simply to forge a connection, no matter how tiny or brief, with hospital patients, families, medical staff, maybe even people who see them parade down the block.

"Our mission," said Clowns' copresident Paurush Shah of Clarks Summit, Pa., "is to spread some cheer to people who may not have visitors, to people who may be feeling down due to their illnesses, and to make anyone around us smile."

Or cry.

"That young people would do something like this on a Friday night rather than go to a bar . . . ," Skerski said, tearing up and trailing off.

In his 1979 book Anatomy of an Illness, Cousins - a peace activist and editor of Saturday Review - told how he had recovered from a life-threatening illness with sidesplitting comedy and Vitamin C. At a time when "patient empowerment" and the "mind-body connection" were not part of the vernacular, Cousins' chronicle became an instant classic.

Hunter "Patch" Adams, the physician, social activist, and iconoclastic pioneer of clown therapy, shifted attention to the clinician. He and his squeaky red nose took the mean out of professional demeanor, and the eponymous 1998 movie made him a poster boy for the healing-with-humor movement.

By then, laughing was being taken very seriously. There was an International Journal of Humor Research. There were studies of laughter's effects on the cardiovascular, immune, and neurochemical systems. There were professional societies, conferences, courses, Web sites, and enough books to fill a small library - all dedicated to the benefits of yuks and yukking.

But a funny thing happened as therapeutic laughter went mainstream: Clowning and comedy took a backseat to compassion. Indeed, that's the operative word in nurse-humorist Patty Wooten's 1996 book, Compassionate Laughter: Jest for Your Health!

Jefferson family physician Richard Wender, who gives an annual orientation seminar on humor to incoming medical students, said: "I'm interested in humor as a way of communicating, of creating healing relationships. Humor is part of how both patients and clinicians cope."