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What makes one person a comedian and another person a jerk or a clown? One recent psychological study tried to figure out if certain factors made someone a comedian. The results are surprising. Comedians were compared to normal people:

When the two groups were compared, what they found was that, compared with normal people, comedians had the following characteristics:

• They found it unusually difficult to feel physical and social pleasure–psychologists call this anhedonia.
• They were antisocial and nonconformist.
• They were prone to magical thinking, like believing in telepathy or paranormal phenomena.
• They were easily distracted and found it difficult to focus.

Actors, meanwhile, shared many of these personality traits with comedians, except they were close to the norm in feeling pleasure. Unlike the comedians, as a group, actors did not experience anhedonia.

Things get even stranger from there. Take a look at the article for the rest.

Full story at PsyBlog.

More cool psychology studies.

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