BEIJING -- A dozen pint-size patients laugh and shout when the man with a red plastic nose waves a magic wand and turns black-and-white drawings to color.

When the clown twists a balloon into the shape of a dog, 8-year-old Ke Xinqiao claps so hard that his mother worries he will accidentally pull out an IV needle. The ecstatic youngster hardly notices as she pats it into place.

His attention is focused on clown Liu Yongjun, who, along with his brother Liu Jinjun, has been brightening up the drab wards of two children's hospitals in Beijing since 2003.

With their goofy blue-and-white balloon trousers and magic wands, the Liu brothers are China's first hospital clowns, pioneering the therapeutic benefits of a dose of laughter.

"This type of performance is taking our clowning to a new level," Liu Yongjun said. "It's not about slapstick. We're here to make the kids laugh, to make them forget. It's all about happiness."

The Liu brothers come from a family of acrobats, magicians and jugglers and have been clowning since they were 11. Now in their 50s, they make their living performing at birthday parties, fairs and luxury hotels in China's capital.

They started entertaining sick children when they signed up with the Beijing-based charity Magic Hospital in 2003.

Xinqiao is a big fan. When the Lius visited at Beijing Women and Children's Hospital, the boy had been hospitalized for two weeks and had another 20 days of treatment for a disease his mother would only describe as neurological.

"He has been so listless," she said, wiping saliva from his mouth. "But when he saw the clowns, he was so excited. It was as if he was a normal child again."

Hospital clowns are familiar figures in the West, where doctors and nurses sometimes don frizzy wigs and crack jokes to jolly small patients along the road to recovery. Some children's hospitals have humor carts, stocked with games, comic books and costumes.

But in China, public hospitals are bleak places where strict visiting hours mean children might see their parents just once a week.

It was the lack of support or activities for hospitalized children that inspired Claudia Vogg, a German woman who was working in China, to set up Magic Hospital.

"All I could see was adults providing for them what adults think they need -- food, clothes, medicine and school work. But I thought, 'They're children, so why not try and bring in a bit of fun?'" she said by phone from her home in Paris, where she is setting up a similar charity.

The doctors and nurses at the 750-bed Women and Children's Hospital, one of the world's biggest hospitals for youngsters, agreed to the program in 2003 after just two meetings, Vogg said.

"I was so surprised, but the doctors all sat there nodding their heads when I explained the concept of 'xiao ye shi yao' or 'laughter is also medicine,'" she said. "I was also surprised because it was a 'laowai' (foreigner) proposing it."

Besides the Liu brothers, the Magic Hospital team includes teachers of art and English. Except for the clowns, who earn $30 each for making two-hour performances twice a week at the hospital, everyone else is a volunteer.

The money comes from private donations and fundraising events, though a few corporations have donated. In the early days, Vogg paid the clowns out of her own pocket.

Magic Hospital also takes clowns to orphanages, schools for the children of migrant workers and homes for street children.

"It's about ensuring that children enjoy their right to be a child -- to have fun and play," said Magda The, a Dutch woman who is one of the group's 13 volunteer workers.

In China, "doctors and nurses know how to administer medicine and treat a patient on medical terms. But a bedside manner has never been a part of the curriculum for medical training," said The, a former liaison officer for the medical charity Doctors Without Borders and a mother of two.

"For the kids, just seeing these guys in costumes and with their painted faces, it's different from the endless parade of white coats. They know they are going to have some fun," said The. "It's also a bit of a respite for parents and the nursing staff."

Beijing Women and Children's is one of the capital's more progressive hospitals, and allows one parent to sleep in a child's room on a cot. But there are few distractions from the hospital tedium, and many of the children are lethargic with drugs, pain or boredom.

"I would really like to have music in all the children's wards, as well as cartoon books and DVDs," said head nurse Chen Jianjun, who also is an associate professor of nursing at Peking University.