« The heavy-light contradiction is the most mysterious and the most ambiguous of all contradictions » wrote Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (p. 13-14). The clown character carries this tension in him by being able to exaggerate, to highlight a feature of caricature to bring laughter, but also by keeping a form of lightness, preventing him from being displaced, unseemly or even tragic. The clown lives on the borders, walking like a tightrope between laughter and tears. Since twenty years we see him appear in health facilities, pediatrics but also in intensive care, emergency and hospices. This text seeks to understand how the clownish humor meets death and invests places where suffering and dying are insurmountable challenges: how do they work in these places? What do they evoke? Using both reflections on humor and testimonies from participating observation, this article makes the figure clownesque an embodied posture of the phenomenological reduction’s gesture, namely the ability to change one’s perspective on the world by suspending the acquired knowledge.