They cite the example of the late Spike Milligan, the comic and star of The Goon Show, who battled manic depression throughout his life. "It is easy to see how this can account for the relationship between the manic side of bipolar disorder and comic performance," the authors say. Manic thinking, a feature of bipolar disorder, emerged as one of their key traits. The researchers believe that the comedians' mindsets as revealed by their high ratings on all four counts helps to explain why they can entertain audiences. The actors emerged as not having introverted personalities, but the comedians did. While the actors scored higher than the general group on three of the four measures, the comedians came out "significantly higher on all four types of psychotic personality traits" compared to them, the researchers reported. It also covered introvertive anhedonia – a reduced ability to feel social and physical pleasure as well as an avoidance of intimacy – and impulsive non-conformity, the tendency towards impulsive, antisocial behaviour, which is often linked to a lack of mood-related self-control.Ĭomedians' scores were then compared to those of 364 actors and 831 people in non-creative occupations. They included unusual experiences, which measures magical thinking, belief in telepathy and other paranormal events and a tendency to experience perceptual aberrations, as well as cognitive disorganisation, which captures distractability and difficulty in focusing one's thoughts. In the study, the 404 male and 119 female comedians filled in a short online version of the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE), which asks about schizophrenic and bipolar features. Equally, 'manic thinking', which is common in people with bipolar disorder, may help people combine ideas to form new, original and humorous connections," Claridge added. "Although schizophrenic psychosis itself can be detrimental to humour, in its lesser form it can increase people's ability to associate odd or unusual things or to think 'outside the box'. He is also one of the three co-authors of the findings, which are published in the British Journal of Psychiatry. "The creative elements needed to produce humour are strikingly similar to those characterising the cognitive style of people with psychosis – both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder," said Professor Gordon Claridge from Oxford University's department of experimental psychology. The results are based on a study of how 523 comedians from the UK, USA and Australia described their own personalities and beliefs when they filled in a questionnaire measuring psychotic traits in people who are not troubled by mental illness.
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