When Robin Williams became best friends with a gorilla

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The sad truth about comedy

Sun 4 September 2022 21:00, UK

The word “genius” drips with ambiguity; those with good taste in comedy will recall the fictional office manager David Brent saying: “If you were to ask me to name three geniuses, I probably wouldn’t say: Einstein, Newton… you know? I’d go: Milligan, Cleese, Everett… Sessions”. As Ricky Gervais’ comically troubled character in The Office illustrated in that scene, it’s all about perspective. Brent would probably just see Alexander Fleming as a nerd who left a bit of bread to go mouldy in his lab and fell on his feet.

No matter how you perceive a genius, I hope we can agree that comedy takes a degree of mental agility, abstract insight and, often, fearless subversion. As Uncle Ben told Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility”. This corny dictum works for comedians as much as it does web-spinning teenagers. A comedian has an important job to make people laugh and keep them happy. This will be most necessary – if not always welcome – in the darkest of hours.

For this reason, the societal role has been filled to a certain degree since the dawn of loquacity. In September 2001, comedy in the US was all but shut down in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks in New York City. As the 27th season of Saturday Night Live kicked off just 18 days later, a solemn Lorne Michaels addressed the New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, “Can we be funny?” Meanwhile, comedian Gilbert Gottfried was publicly chastised for making a “too soon” joke that his flight would be making a stop at the Empire State Building.

Indeed, 9/11 was a horrific period; after such an event, things will take an undetermined period to return to relative normality. Perhaps the most important factor in the process of mental healing is laughter, our cleanest indulgence. Sadly, in the modern day, the line between jokes and veracity has been blurred, and all too often, comedians looking to bring humour and healing to serious subjects are misunderstood.

So, what sort of people would want to take on such a responsibility in our minefield society?

Often they are “geniuses” looking to heal their own ails; the audience’s enjoyment is just a fortunate by-product.

While many jokers are perfectly contented, a disproportionate quantity of our beloved comedians and comedy actors suffer from depression, a symptom common with cases of heightened intelligence. As Ernest Hemingway was famously quoted: “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know”.

Discontentment in intelligent minds could be chalked up to the fact that these minds understand the world for its oft masked realities; ignorance is bliss. Otherwise, it can be explained through a swift animal analogy. If I were to enclose a trout and a dolphin in an aquarium, which would be the first to exhibit symptoms of depression and anxiety?

As human minds evolved, they acquired unprecedented levels of intelligence. We have gained the benefits of a complex society and advanced technology, but as with everything, we must take the rough with the smooth. Sadly, our world isn’t all flowers and Disney endings, and as we soak in these harsh realities, one of our few safety blankets is the miracle of comedy.

American writer Mark Twain once said: “The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven”. The dark truth about comedy is that it’s intrinsically connected with darkness, much like the crossed, sparking wires of pleasure and pain. Some of our most successful comedians have the wondrous ability to turn dark realities into comedy gold, but it often comes with a price.

Professor Gordon Claridge of the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology once conducted a study to measure character traits in comedians. Questionnaires were filled in by 523 comedians (404 men and 119 women) from the UK, US and Australia.

“We found that comedians had a rather unusual personality profile, which was rather contradictory,” Claridge said of his findings. “On the one hand, they were rather introverted, depressive, rather schizoid, you might say. And on the other hand, they were rather extroverted and manic”.

“That was a rather unusual profile,” he added. “The actors we compared them with didn’t show that, and this was highly significantly different from the norms on the test. Possibly the comedy – the extroverted side – is a way of dealing with the depressive side. Of course, this is not true of all comedians”.

Recognition of this unfortunate trait has led to the term “The Sad Clown Paradox”. When we think of these sad clowns, many people’s minds will turn to Robin Williams, the beloved American comedian and actor, often described as a genius among peers, who tragically took his own life in 2014.

“Every time you get depressed, comedy will be there to drag your ass out of it,” Williams told The Guardian of his internal fluctuations in 1996.

Terry Gilliam, who worked with Williams in his Golden Globe-winning film The Fisher King, said the late actor’s comedic talents were “a miracle”, but such a gift “doesn’t come from nothing. When the gods gift you with the kind of talent Robin had, there’s a price to pay”.

“It comes from deep problems inside. A concern, all sorts of fears. Yet he could always channel those things and turn them into gold. I think that comes with the territory,” the Monty Python legend added.

Williams is just one of countless comedians to have openly suffered from depression. John Cleese, Stephen Fry, Ruby Wax, Jack Dee, Caroline Aherne and David Walliams are among some of the big names who have discussed inner darkness beneath a veneer of comedy.

An important takeaway from this unfortunate pattern is that mental health is by no means black and white. Those struggling with depression won’t always appear as such to the untrained eye. They may hide behind a shield of humour or avoid opening up to discuss their inner conflicts.

In 2017, nearly 6000 suicides were recorded in Great Britain; 75% were men. In fact, the leading cause of death for males under the age of 50 is suicide. One of the multiple factors behind this gender gap is an outdated, ingrained ideology of what it means to be a man.

Dr Natasha Bijlani, a Consultant Psychiatrist at Priory Hospital Roehampton, explained (via Priory Group): “Traditionally, men have been less likely to seek support for mental health issues. This is probably for a number of reasons, including stigma and the traditional ‘strong male’ stereotype still prevalent in our society – the idea that expressing emotion is a sign of weakness”.