Comedians Hide Unexpected Secrets

According to a new scientific study, it turns out that comedians are, on average, shier than people engaged in other professions, a very counter-intuitive conclusion, considering the fact that it takes a lot of courage to appear on stage in front of hundreds or thousands of individuals and expose yourself to their critic, be it positive or negative. Some 31 professional comedians have been analyzed for this research, and their level of openness has been assessed using personality tests.

“I guess the stage gives them the opportunity to be what they want to be and may not necessarily represent their daily-life personalities,” University of New Mexico in Albuquerque (UNM) anthropologist Gil Greengross explains. Along with colleague Geoffrey Miller, he has given 31 comedians standardized personality tests meant to assess the five main traits of personality – openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, and neuroticism.

The comedians had to simply rate their agreement with several statements intended to give scientists a window of sorts into their mind and their inner feelings. The results they obtained were then cross-referenced with those coming from 400 students and 10 comedy writers, so that the investigation team could get a clear picture of the differences between the three groups. While levels of neuroticism remained roughly the same in all of them, most others differed considerably.

The 60-question survey revealed the fact that comedians scored higher in openness to experience than the students, but yet lower than the comic writers. For the other three traits, agreeableness, conscientiousness and extroversion, the comedians scored lower than both the other groups, which was a big surprise for the researchers. Out of the groups of entertainers, 3 were women and 28 men.

“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,” Greengross explains. The study that he has conducted has been part of his dissertation concerning the value of humor in human evolution. “Comedians are quite diverse. The need for external validation is probably the one thing that unifies comedians,” Dara O'Brain, who is an Irish comic, adds.