Mother Jones
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If you’ve ever seen footage of comedian Bill Hicks taking on a heckler, you might have thought to yourself, “Wow, that was pretty psychotic.”
Well, according to a recent study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, you weren’t that far off. For the study, which is titled, “Psychotic traits in comedians,” researchers recruited 523 comedians (404 male and 119 female, most of whom were amateurs) from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The researchers determined that comedians scored significantly higher on four types of psychotic personality traits compared to a control group of individuals who had non-artistic jobs. The study focuses on two major categories of psychosis—bipolar disorder and schizophrenia—and examines impulsive non-conformity.
“The results of this study substantially confirmed our expectation that comedians would behave like other creative groups in showing a high level of psychotic personality traits,” the authors wrote. “They did so across all the domains sampled by the questionnaire we used, from schizoid and schizophrenic-like characteristics through to manic-depressive features.”
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