Background
Aside from getting bookers to e-mail you back, mental health and suicide are the most prevalent things plaguing comedians. Yet there’s been extremely little professional research done on mental illness among comedians.
This study really was conducted by accident. I applied for a talk at TEDxSaltLakeCity 2018 (one of the few that strictly vets speakers) for a discussion on joking on suicide, mental health among comedians and what goes “too far”. I may not be the foremost expert on the subject (I believe the expert is Stark McConville), but after having written a show based off my previous suicide note that required learning how to carefully craft punchlines in and out of dark topics and having over 11 years experience as a stand-up the selection committee felt I was well versed on the topic.
At first when selected I had a minor 2 day panic attack at realizing the “what goes to far” will be a ruler that internet trolls and other comics will use to judge me for the rest of my career. So I took a Xanax. Then that night I sat down with my co-writer (a bottle of scotch) and wrote my first draft as a hypothesis. I used my own experience while trying to aggregate the multiple viewpoints I’ve seen in the conversations that have taken place inside the comedy community.
The next step was searching through a mass of scientific papers using my girlfriends grad-school access to correct factual errors and throw in some fancy statistics TED talk viewers tend to love. As i searched something became incredibly evident. Although psychologists love to study “humor” they don’t seem to study the people that perform it. Infact most papers didn’t even consider consulting “professionals” (comedians). They don’t even have the researchers bother to try writing or performing their own jokes on a stage. Instead it’s the traditional university scientist who pulled in a hand full of undergrad students who thought getting paid $20 to look at humorous cartoons sounded better than being hooked up to a plasma donation machine. The only sign the scientists might have an eye for comedy is that in one study they listed cumulative survival time on a chart as “Cum survival” vs “Age” which made me giggle.
I could find 3 studies from our current decade (2010-2018) that applied to my subject matter.
“Psychotic Traits in Comedians”* which proved the most useful comparing 523 comedians vs 364 actors and 831 “normal people” in a control group using O-LiFE scores (Oxford-Liverpool inventory of Feelings and Experience). “Does comedy kill? A retrospective, longitudinal cohort, nested case–control study of humour and longevity in 53 British comedians”*. And “Is the last “man” standing in comedy the least funny? A retrospective cohort study of elite stand-up comedians versus other entertainers”*. Which compared 200 stand ups, 113 comedy actors, and 184 dramatic actors.
The 2 studies on life length told little since they didn’t look at much more than how long they lived. So I can tell you that the funnier scientists think you are the sooner you’ll likely die. But we don’t know if that’s due to suicide, drug overdose, being a black comic who was accidently booked for a white supremacist rally, etc.
Since these studies lacked the information I needed to correct the hypothesis I created a Google Form to query the community and dropped it across a few FB communities. Response was amazing. Dropped it in a few more. Then a few more. There was so many responses I realized grabbing international data as well would be best.
The end result: 494 comedians responded! From Seattle to South Africa, Ireland to Omaha, New York to New Zealand. We accidentally created (to my knowledge) the 2nd largest worldwide collection of data on mental health in comedy this decade. The responses were amazing and reading through some of the written sections made me feel truly less alone and I hope you feel the same way. So thank you so much to everyone that submitted.
Ultimately during the many drafting and rewriting processes on the TEDxSaltLakeCity talk, the speaker guiding team wanted to narrow the focus to make it the best talk possible. I had to choose between arguing for using jokes to cope with trauma and what “the line” is of “too far”, or to focus just on comedians mental health. When they said: “Do you want to pick the comedians, or the jokes?”. My honest instantaneous response as a comedian was “I don’t think there’s a difference”. Since our jokes are such a strong part of who we are.
But ultimately I chose the jokes as the focus because that’s how we as comedians express who we are. They’re also the part that I think is most in need of “defense” since the people who would be “against” comedians mental health would usually be ignorant to mental health in general and there are better people for a general mental health talk. Focusing on the jokes will hopefully help people listen and to understand who we are as comics.
The talk will be released online later this month (Oct 2018). In person, it got a standing ovation at a 2000 seat theater, so hopefully, it does justice in aggregating the comedy communities conversation into a persuasive essay.
Due to the focus shift. I didn’t get to use as much of the fully collected data as I would have liked. But it was still very useful. So now after getting out of my own depressive slump, I’m publishing the data as well as my own “open-mic science paper” break down of some of the more interesting numbers.
If you took the time to read through this whole background you’ll probably want to click the Full Study “Paper” button up top. That way you’ll see all the details and really cool info (as well as link to download the complete data set!).
*1. The British Journal of Psychiatry (2014) 204, 341–345. doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.113.134569