Personality tests reveal the flip side of comedy | New Scientist 8/04/19, 11)37 p. m.

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Personality tests reveal the flip side of comedy

48

LIFE 16 March 2009

By Ewen Callaway

You wouldn’t know it from watching Chris Rock or Will Ferrell perform, but professional comedians are shyer than most other people, a new study suggests.

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Personality tests reveal the flip side of comedy | New Scientist 8/04/19, 11)37 p. m.

“I guess the stage gives them the opportunity to be what they want to be and may not necessarily represent their daily-life personalities,” says Gil Greengross, an
anthropologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

He and colleague Geoffrey Miller gave standardised personality tests to 31 professional comedians passing through Albuquerque’s only comedy club, Laffs, which
closed earlier this year.

Comic quiz
The 60-question test gauged the “big five” classic personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The comedians rated their agreement with statements such as “I think it’s interesting to develop new hobbies”, “At times I have felt bitter and resentful”, and
“Poetry has little or no effect on me”.

The researchers then compared their scores to those of 400 university students and 10 humour writers.

On average, the professional comics – all but three of them being men – scored highly on openness to new experience compared with students, yet lower than
comedy writers.

The comedians also had lower scores on average for conscientiousness, agreeableness and extroversion, compared with the other groups. The team noticed no
difference in neuroticism scores.

No laughing matter
“The fact is that a lot of the time they spend by themselves. They also travel a lot. That might explain why they do have introverted personalities,” says Greengross,
who performed the study as part of a dissertation on the evolutionary value of humour.

“Comedians are quite diverse,” says the Irish comic Dara O’Briain. “The need for external validation is probably the one thing that unifies comedians.”

Introversion isn’t the first quality he would associate with his profession, but he says comedians tend to be more restrained than their on-stage performances
suggest. “Being the funny guy among your friends is a very different skill than being funny to a bunch of total strangers,” he told New Scientist.

Sex differences
Robert Provine, a developmental neurobiologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of the book Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, agrees
with Greengross and Miller’s findings. But he thinks another feature of comedians is even more noteworthy – their sex.

The vast majority of all professional comedians are men, he notes, adding that both women and men tend to laugh more at male speakers than female. Some
researchers speculate that this is because humour is an adaptive trait that helps women assess the fitness of a potential mate.

Self-deprecation
Greengross and Miller also compared nine amateur comedians to professionals and found no statistical differences in their personality scores, despite obvious
differences in their routines.

In another paper, he and Miller found that men and women see self-deprecating humour as an attractive trait in potential wives or husbands.

Greengross plans to look more closely at how personality traits affect a comedian’s success. His interest in comedy is strictly professional – he has no plans to launch
a career in the funny business, he jokes.

“You should go to amateur nights and see how bad people are,” he says. “It’s a really demanding job.”

Journal reference: Personality and Individual Difference (DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2009.01.045)

More on these topics: psychology brains evolution

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