I first did stand-up comedy in 2004. I’d always enjoyed making people laugh, which led me to take part in numerous comedy plays and the like in school and university. I never had the nerve to try stand-up though, I simply wasn’t brave enough.
Then I spent 18 months embalming dead people for a medical school, which really does tend to alter your standards when it comes to things you’re able/willing to tolerate, so I opted to give stand-up a go. What was the worst that could happen: I’d end up in a room full of people not laughing at me? I spend every day in a room full of people not laughing at me, at least these ones will still be breathing and have all their organs on the inside.
I signed up to do a brief five-minute set at a local open-mic night in Cardiff. The gig itself was a fun regular night but based in a pub in the rougher side of town with a regular clientele who would probably be given their own definitely-not-exploitative Channel 4 show if a producer had wandered in. I was meant to be the newbie in the middle, but on the night all the other acts cancelled so I was promoted to headliner, which was nice. It went surprisingly well, all things considered. Afterwards, when telling friends and family what I’d done, the most common response was “you must be mad”.
According to research published today, this is true. A study revealed that, when asked to fill in a questionnaire that looks into psychotic characteristics in “healthy” people, comedians scored “significantly higher on all four types of psychotic personality traits” when compared with the scores of actors and “non-creative” occupations. This obviously results in a number of speculations as to how elements of psychosis are useful for the creative process, how elements of madness make it easier to entertain a crowd etc.
It would be easy to critique the report(s) by emphasising how science and psychology are more complicated than that, as is my usual response, but ignoring the potential problems with self-assessment, the fact that psychotic traits can be normally distributed in the population and other issues, I thought it might be useful to critique science’s understanding of comedy for a change. As that rare thing, a neuroscientist/psychiatry lecturer with a decade of stand-up experience, I’m probably well placed to comment.
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