Although being on stage at the Ice House was no fun, waiting backstage with the other performers proved to be more interesting. Professional comedians are, if you will excuse the pun, a funny group of people. They have chosen to make a living in a difficult and highly stressful way. They have to stand onstage, night after night, and make a group of complete strangers laugh out loud. No matter how they feel, or what is happening in their own lives, they have to be funny. In view of this, a small number of psychologists have been interested in analyzing their minds.
Woody Allen once remarked: “Most of the time I don’t have much fun, the rest of the time I don’t have fun at all.” But how much truth is there in the popular stereotype of the sad clown? It is easy to think of high-profile examples, including the British comedian Spike Milligan (who suffered from manic-depression throughout his life) and the American performers Lenny Bruce and John Belushi (both of whom are believed to have committed suicide).
In 1975, the psychiatrist Samuel Janus published a groundbreaking paper on the psychology of comedians. Keen to investigate the truth behind the popular notion of the sad clown, Janus interviewed fifty-five well-known professional comedians about their lives.
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Janus gathered together some of the top names in comedy, working only with those who were earning at least a six-figure salary and were known nationally. The results revealed that the vast majority of the group possessed above average intelligence (with few achieving the classification of “genius”), 80 percent had sought psychotherapy at some point in their lives, and nearly all were extremely anxious about losing their star status. This last finding caused Janus to conclude that “several were able to enjoy life and reap the benefits of their fame and fortune, but they were in a very small minority.” His report also shows the problems of working with highly successful, but angst-ridden, professional comedians. Although almost all performed well on the tests of intelligence, Janus noted that “the problem was not one of getting them to respond, it was one of continuously allaying their anxiety and reassuring them that they were indeed doing well.” Also, when asked about their experiences with psychotherapy, Janus describes how several of his participants said that the therapist had asked them to “lie down on the couch and tell me everything you know,” shortly followed by the comment: “And now he’s doing my act in Philadelphia.”
PRETEND THE WORLD IS FUNNY AND FOREVER
Janus’s image of “comedian as sad clown” was not supported by work published in 1981 by Seymour and Rhoda Fisher, psychoanalysts from the State University of New York at Syracuse.
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The Fishers conducted an extensive investigation into more than forty well-known comedians and clowns, including Sid Caesar, Jackie Mason, and Blinko the Clown, and published their findings in a wonderful book titled
Pretend the World Is Funny and Forever.
As part of the work, they administered the classic test known as the Rorschach Inkblot Test, in which participants were asked to look at an ambiguous inkblot and say what the inkblot resembles. The test has been used extensively in research and even features in a well-known Freudian joke:
A man goes to a psychoanalyst. The analyst gets out a stack of cards containing ink blots, shows them to the man one at a time, and asks him to say what the ink-blots remind him of. The man looks at the first ink blot and says, “Sex.” Then he looks at the second ink blot and says, “Sex,” again. In fact, he goes through the whole stack of images, saying the word “sex” in response to every one. The psychiatrist looks concerned and says, “I don’t wish to worry you, but you seem to have sex on the mind.” The man looks surprised, and answers, “I can’t believe you just said that—you are the one with all the dirty pictures.”
Since most of the tests took place in restaurants and circus dressing rooms, the Fishers often found them difficult to administer because of constant interruptions by members of the public and fellow performers.
Contrary to the popular conception of the “sad clown” and to Janus’s previous results, the Fishers found little evidence of psychopathology. They were surprised to discover that their interviewees appeared remarkably resilient and well adjusted despite the stressful nature of working as professional comedians.
Another aspect of the Fishers’ work examined the childhood experiences of the comedians and clowns. They noted that the majority of their interviewees started young, and were often considered the “class clown.” In line with the “superiority” theory, many related instances in which they would use humor to get one up on their teachers. One performer recalled how the teacher had asked him to go to the blackboard and spell “petroleum.” He promptly walked up to the front of the class, picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote the word “oil.” Professional comedians tend to come from relatively low-income families and to have been unhappy as children, and thus their performances may represent an attempt to compensate for these difficult early experiences by gaining the affection of an audience. There is considerable anecdotal evidence to support the idea. Woody Allen once said that the need to be accepted was one of his primary motivations for being funny; Jack Benny didn’t enjoy a holiday in Cuba because no one recognized him; and W. C. Fields once explained why he liked making people laugh: “At least for a short moment, they love me.”
The second element of the Fishers’ research examined the psychological qualities associated with being funny. Several performers admitted that they were intensely curious about people and behavior, reporting how they would endlessly watch others go about their lives until they found some small idiosyncrasy that could form the basis for a new joke or routine. The Fishers noted that there were many parallels between comedians and social scientists. They argued that both groups are constantly on the prowl for novel perspectives on human behavior, the only major difference being that in the first case such insights make people laugh and in the others, they form the basis for academic papers. Having spent my career reading such publications, I would venture that this alleged distinction fails to clearly separate the two groups.
The Fishers also set out to examine the relationship between comedy and anxiety. When presented with inkblots, people often report that after seeing one image they realize that the blot can be seen in a different way. After carefully analyzing the types of images that the comedians reported seeing in the random inkblots, the Fishers concluded that their participants often produced a unique class of “nice monster” imagery, wherein threatening figures would be transformed into something far more pleasant. A “dragon with flames shooting out of his mouth” would become a noble and misunderstood figure, and a “dirty hyena” would change into a lovely cuddly pet. The Fishers interpreted this as evidence that comedians and clowns are unconsciously motivated to use humor as a way of coping with distressing events.
James Rotton, a psychologist from Florida International University, also questioned the notion that comedy is inevitably associated with sadness and psychopathology. He examined a copy of Hoffman’s
Entertainment Personalities of the Past
for the years of birth and death of well-known comedians and compared it to a control group of noncomedic entertainers born in the same years. (Rotton restricted his list to male comedians after discovering that the ages of many female comedians were unreliable because they didn’t match other bibliographic sources, suggesting a possible chronopsychology of comedy).
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Rotton described his findings in a paper titled “Trait Humor and Longevity: Do Comics Have the Last Laugh?” and argued that comedians were no more likely to die younger than other entertainers. A subsequent analysis of the cause of death of comedians (gleaned by examining the obituaries of performers published in
Time
and
Newsweek
between 1980 and 1989) revealed no evidence of an excess of heart attacks, cancers, pneumonia, accidents, or suicides. In short, there is no evidence to suggest that the obvious stresses and strains associated with having to be funny night after night leads to an early demise.
Rotton’s findings are in line with other work suggesting that being able to laugh at life reduces anxiety and that, if anything, comedy may actually be good for your health. In the thirteenth century, the surgeon Henri de Mondeville speculated that laughter may promote recovery from illness: “The surgeon must forbid anger, hatred, and sadness in the patient, and remind him that the body grows fat from joy and thin from sadness.” A few hundred years later, William Shakespeare echoed the same sentiment: “Frame your mind to mirth and merriment, which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.”
Recent research has supported a link between laughter, coping with stress, and psychological and physical well-being. According to this work, people who spontaneously use humor to cope with stress have especially healthy immune systems, are 40 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke, experience less pain during dental surgery, and live 4.5 years longer than most.
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In 1990, researchers discovered that watching a video of Bill Cosby performing his stand-up routine results in enhanced production of salivary immunoglobulin A—a chemical that plays a key role in preventing upper respiratory tract infection (apparently these beneficial effects were significantly reduced when participants listened to Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s classic “2,000-Year-Old-Man” routine).
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In 2005, Michael Miller and his colleagues from the University of Maryland studied the relationship between finding the world funny and the inner lining of blood vessels. When such vessels expand, they increase blood flow around the body and promote cardiovascular well-being. Participants were shown scenes from films that were likely either to make them feel anxious (such as the opening thirty minutes of
Saving Private Ryan
) or to make them laugh (such as the “orgasm” scene from
When Harry Met Sally
). Overall, participants’ blood flow dropped by around 35 percent after watching the stress-inducing films, but rose by 22 percent after seeing the more humorous material. On the basis of the results, the researchers recommend that people laugh for at least fifteen minutes each day.
In a similar vein, James Rotton examined the effects that watching different kinds of videos had on hospital patients recovering from orthopedic surgery.
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Patients in one group were asked to select funny films from a list that included
Bananas, Naked Gun,
and
The Producers;
those in another group were denied access to any material that might induce a smile, and they were instead asked to select movies from a “serious” list, including titles such as
Die Hard II, Casablanca,
and
The Hunt for Red October.
The experimenters secretly monitored the quantity of major pain relievers that the patients consumed via a self-controlled pump. Those watching funny films used about 60 percent fewer pain-relieving drugs than those looking at the serious movies. In an interesting twist to the experiment, the researchers also included another group of patients who were not allowed to select which comedy films to watch but instead were given the movies selected by others. This group administered significantly more drugs than either of the other groups, scientifically proving that there is nothing more painful than watching a comedy that doesn’t make you laugh.
Finally, a team of researchers asked participants to reflect on their mortality by constructing mock wills, completing their own death certificates (including an estimate of their dates and causes of death), and writing the eulogies for their own funerals.
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Researchers discovered that those who had exhibited a prior tendency to laugh at the absurdities of life did not find the tasks as stressful as the more gloomy participants had found them. Exactly the same effect has emerged in more realistic settings. Bereavement counselors interviewing people six months after they had lost their spouses found that those who could laugh about the loss were more able than others to come to terms with the situation and to move on with their lives.
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However, as one of the jokes submitted to LaughLab illustrates, it is possible to take this idea too far:
A man dies and his wife telephones her local newspaper, and says, “I would like to print the following obituary: Bernie is dead.”
The man at the newspaper pauses, and says, “Actually, for the same price you could print six words.”
The woman replies, “Oh, okay, can I go with: Bernie is dead. Toyota for sale.”
HEARD THE ONE ABOUT THE RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISTS?
Given the physical and psychological benefits of laughter, it isn’t surprising that some scientists have investigated the characteristics of people who do, and do not, see the funny side of life. Some of the most intriguing work in the area has been carried out by Vassilis Saroglou, a psychologist from the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, who looked at the relationship between laughter and religious fundamentalism.