This week, the International Journal of Cardiology published a landmark study that revealed standup comedians are more likely to suffer premature death than actors.
As a standup comedian, my first thought upon reading it was “duh”. I’m sure there are less healthy career choices than comedy, but most of them involve asbestos.
If I’d read that a study found standups are more likely than most to live long, happy lives and die peacefully at an advanced age having achieved a serene sense of contentment with their lot, that would have shocked me. Hearing that a career in standup is an express ticket to the grave is like finding out a career in politics leads to moral compromises: yesterday’s news.
What was a little more disconcerting was finding out the comedians included in the study were the elite, the superstars, the crème de la crème of comedy royalty. Building on an earlier, broader study, Does Comedy Kill?, professor Simon Stewart and his team at Australian Catholic University drew 200 comedians from Ranker lists of “the funniest standup comedians of all time” and “the funniest people of all time”. They found that highly rated and successful standups were more likely to die young, and more likely to die from unnatural causes, than their acting counterparts.
What’s more, the more highly-ranked the comedian, the shorter their life.
After another night dining on Hungry Jack’s at midnight and falling asleep at 5am, low life expectancy for comedians like me makes an awful lot of sense. But low life expectancy even for the big names? The rich and famous? That means if I keep hustling, keep slogging away with five-minute sets in tiny rooms in front of three people who spend the whole gig looking at their phones – if I somehow manage to catch enough of a break that I graduate to sold-out shows in huge, luxurious theatres – then I’m doomed anyway. Standup is an unhealthy lifestyle, but if it’s going to stay unhealthy even after I end up making more money on it than I spend, the future is even darker than I assumed. And I had assumed it was pretty dark already. After all, I’m a comedian.
So why do standups die young? Does standup destroy a person, or does it simply attract people who are already self-destructive?
The first thing to recognise is that even when you’ve hit it big, comedy is an unstable existence: in fact, it might get more unstable the better you are at it. The travel gets more constant, the hours get later, and the need for a regular job and all the dull stability that goes with it gets less pressing.
And then there’s the perks. Unlike the closely monitored workplace of a film or TV set, most of comedy life is spent at night in bars and pubs. It lends itself naturally to heavy drinking, and less legal substances; success just gives you more money and time to enjoy them. You’re only working for an hour a night, what else are you going to do? There’s a lot of time to kill, and a lot of it is spent alone.
The deaths of great comics such as Lenny Bruce, Mitch Hedberg and Harris Wittels are testament to the tendency of comedians, like rock stars, to live fast, die young and leave a sarcastic corpse. As Stewart noted in the report: “Successful dramatic actors are often regarded as ‘role models’ ... this does not appear to apply to standup comedians, who are often expected to behave eccentrically.”
But it’s not just the comedy lifestyle that’s a killer: the artform itself is peculiarly calculated to break the spirit.
Standup comedy makes a wonderfully seductive promise: the promise of a sensation so intensely pleasurable it makes every other positive feeling you’ve ever had seem dissatisfyingly mild. It’s the sensation of standing on a stage, telling a joke, and having a room full of people roar with laughter. If you’ve never experienced this, let me assure you, it feels unbelievably good. I’ve never tried heroin, but I find it hard to believe that it’s a better high than killing on stage. That’s probably why so many comics do try heroin: it might be the next best thing.
But that promise comes with a nightmarish flipside: if hearing an audience laugh at your jokes is the biggest thrill you’ll ever have, hearing an audience not laugh is…well, I don’t have the words to describe how awful it is. Think of the dream you had where you accidentally went to school naked, and then imagine that you woke up from that dream to discover that actually there’s a swarm of spiders hatching inside your face. Bombing at a gig is something like that, but worse. And there’s absolutely no hiding from it. No matter how strong your powers of self-delusion are – and with most artistic types, they’re pretty strong – you can’t conjure up laughs where no laughs are. The judgment of a comedy audience is cruel, remorseless and instant.
It’s a sickening deal that every comic strikes: the only way to have a chance at that dizzying high is to risk the terrifying low. Every time you aim for the moment of transcendent bliss, you’re inviting the moment of ultimate humiliation. You might think that fear goes away when you’re packing out theatres around the world – but even for the rich and famous, there’s always a possibility they won’t laugh. That’s what every comedian you see is carrying around with them all the time. It’s the life we chose.
Is it any wonder a profession founded upon such a Faustian pact attracts the disturbed, the erratic, the emotionally needy? It’d be wrong to say every standup enters the business for the same reason, but there’s no doubt that it exerts a powerful pull on people who crave approval so much that it’s worth the risk of having their self-esteem annihilated on a regular basis. When self-worth is elusive enough that you can only derive it from packs of strangers in bars, there could be some psychological issues at play.
And of course the terrible irony is the vulnerability that draws people to the affirmation of a laughing crowd is exactly the same quality make it most difficult to survive the crushing weight of a silent one. Why would anyone willingly pursue this life, unless they were pretty messed-up to begin with?
The fact is in comedy, it helps to be pretty messed-up. To view the world through a prism that makes everything around you joke material is a quality not necessarily associated with good mental health. But how long can you keep it up for? Comedy can help us survive, but not indefinitely. The deaths of magnificently funny bastards like Robin Williams and Richard Jeni come as a shock: how can someone who makes us laugh so much be so unhappy? The fact is that sometimes the only defence against unhappiness is to make people laugh – but it only defends, it doesn’t cure.
So: a job that is best-suited to the emotionally unstable, that carries an inherent and unavoidable risk of devastating trauma on a regular basis, and that necessitates an increasingly irregular and stressful lifestyle the further one’s career advances? No, it’s not surprising so many comedians die young. It’s more surprising that so many don’t.
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. Hotlines in other countries can be found here
