Comedians are sometimes hailed as the new rock stars – and now researchers claim they have "psychotic personalities."
The claim has been made by British psychiatrists.
They argue that an "unusual personality", often linked to manic behaviour, is the key to making other people laugh.
Writing in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the researchers say their findings are an extension of the idea that creativity is often associated with madness.
While some comedians, such as Stephen Fry, have struggled publicly with mental health issues, the research may be the first to pin down the stereotype of the sad clown.
However the researchers say the psychotic traits displayed by comedians need not be unhealthy.
For their research, they found more than 500 professional comedians, of whom 119 were women.
These were compared with a group of 364 actors and to another 831 "ordinary" people.
They found that comedians scored very highly on a measure of "impulsive non-conformity" but also on measures of introverted personality.
Professor Gordon Claridge, of Oxford University, UK, said: “Our study shows that, as creative people, comedians rate highly on the same personality traits as those regularly observed in other creative individuals.
"The traits in question are labelled ‘psychotic’ because they represent healthy equivalents of features such as moodiness, social introversion and the tendency to lateral thinking.”
He 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’.
"Equally, manic thinking, which is common in people with bipolar disorder, may help people combine ideas to form new, original and humorous connections.”
Psychotic traits in comedians. British Journal of Psychiatry, 16 January 2014; bjp.bp.113.134569,
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