How to Talk to Anyone (Junior Talker #5) by DeYtH Banger (old books to read .TXT) 📕

of panel shows comedians get invited to take part in. His point of view, given to Radio Times, was that perhaps the BBC shouldn’t have announced that it was going to do more to have women on panel shows, because it then ran the risk of women regarding their booking on these shows as the result of an edict or a version of tokenism.

Mob rule on TwitterIt was a point well made, but the quote was taken out of context in the interview, and Ó Briain was met with an avalanche of criticism on Twitter. “I was getting tweets from people going, ‘Oh Dara, I used to like you but you can f*** off now.’ And you’re going, ‘Eh, I was misquoted’. ‘Oh, sorry, okay’. Really? I’d almost prefer if you dug in and stuck with it. It’s unbelievable irritating.

 

“Somebody from here [Ireland] got very angry about it and used phrases like, ‘As one of the gatekeepers it behoves you to speak more clearly.’ I said I was misquoted, and she said, ‘It’s your fault if you’re misquoted’. No, you just want to have the argument. I am on the same side as you. But people click into a mode of ‘no’.”

The mob rule of Twitter, the endless circular arguments, the frustrating clarifications, can be summed up by a quote Ó Briain gives from Stephen Colbert: “Who would have thought a medium based on 140 characters could lead to misunderstanding?” Eighty per cent of online arguments, he says, can be concluded by saying “it’s ‘you’re’ not ‘your’. Goodbye.”

Enda Kenny is on the radio talking about the possibility of diaspora voting. As someone potentially affected by it, how does Ó Briain feel?

“I’m not in favour of diaspora voting, particularly for parliamentary elections. Possibly for presidential elections. But for a parliamentary election, I don’t think that I, living in London, should have a say in the economic policies that affect how you all live here. Whatever your level of interest, if you’re paying your taxes to a different exchequer, then you don’t get to decide the direction. A parliamentary election is: do we go left or right? Do we go austerity or not? I shouldn’t be sitting in London, looking over at Ireland going [he adopts a faintly evil voice], ‘I think you should have austerity. I think you need to knuckle down’.”

Writing, freestyleÓ Briain lives in London with his wife – Susan, a urology surgeon – and their two children. He says he goes to bed at about 3am or 4am, writing his shows in headings, not the full text. I point out that Jay-Z doesn’t write his lyrics down. “Oh yes, I flow like Jay-Z, it’s often been said,” he says, laughing.

 

Shows usually come once every two years. This one took three.

 

“I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do,” he concludes.

There has to be something else that he really wants to do? “I’d really like to carry on doing this, weirdly. This will stop. I don’t have a sitcom I really want to do. I don’t want to drift into movies. [I want] to remain sufficiently relevant and [for] people to come along and see me carrying on doing live shows. It’s unusual in a showbiz career to say I’ve reached a lovely plateau and I’d like to maintain this plateau as long as I could.

“Certainly there’s other TV stuff, and a couple of science projects, that would be grand. But the priority would be being able to come back and still get an audience. There’s an awkward part of your career, which is in the next five or 10 years, where people go, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen him, I get the gist of that’. And then you have to disappear for 15 or 20 years and then you re-emerge. Quietly disappear and then return ironically. And people go, ‘What a trooper’, and you get a second burst of it.”

Like Take That? “Exactly like Take That. It guts me that in the time I’ve been doing this, Take That have come and gone twice. It feels like an inordinately long period. Stand-up careers are very long in comparison to most other careers. They’ve had it and lost it two separate times. . . I met Howard [Donald, of Take That] outside a hotel the day after that story broke,” he says, the story being Take That’s tax affairs. “I just said, ‘Hey Howard, how are you, how’s your week been?’.” Ó Briain asked the question very pointedly, “and he just went, ‘I’ve a bit of a flu, actually’, and I just stopped and went, ‘Really?’ and he went, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah.’ I don’t know Howard that well that he would open up to me, but nonetheless. No, Howard, it’s not the flu.”

 

Crowd Tickler runs at Vicar Street from October 15 to November 29 QUICK QUESTIONS: WHAT MAKES Ó BRIAIN TICK? Earliest childhood memory? Being given a red train on my birthday. I recently mentioned this to my parents, and they said: “You were never given a red train.” Funniest Irish comedian? Dave Allen. Although there would be moments of transcendence from Tommy [Tiernan], I have to say. Last time you cried? Watching the end of White House Down. I was on a plane in a heightened state of emotionality. Biggest fear? There are unspeakable fears you have when you have children. Even now I can’t articulate them.

 

 

 

Do Comedians Possess Bipolar Traits?

Stand-up comedians and bipolar disorder

 

 

 

 

I previously discussed the unique personality traits of comedians. A new study looked at the issue from a different angle. Research on other creative people has shown that there is a connection between creativity and psychotic traits related to schizophrenia and mania (half of bipolar disorder). The new study wanted to check if the connection is true for stand-up comedians as well.

 

 

Source:The study included 523 comedians (404 men, 119 women, mean age of 31 years), who were recruited through comedy societies, websites, social media and personal invitations by the researchers. As a control group, 364 actors (153 men and 211 women, mean age of 30 years) were also recruited in a similar way to the comedians. Both samples were taken from UK, USA and Australia. The majority of them (57% of the comedians and 73% of the actors) were amateurs. As an additional control, 831 ordinary people (246 men and 585 women, mean age of 31 years) who constitute the average norms in the population for the scales used in this study.

The subjects completed a questionnaire measuring four different aspects of psychoticism (not to be confused with psychopaths).

Here are the descriptions of the scales used in the study from the study itself (with a few changes to simplify):

 

“a) Unusual Experiences, measuring magical thinking, belief in telepathy and other paranormal events, and a tendency to experience perceptual aberrations

b) Cognitive Disorganisation, measuring distractibility and difficulty in focusing thoughts

c) Introvertive Anhedonia, measuring a reduced ability to feel social and physical pleasure, including an avoidance of intimacy

d) Impulsive Non-conformity, measuring a tendency towards impulsive, antisocial behavior, often suggesting a lack of mood-related self-control”

What the researchers found was the following:

1) Both actors and comedians scored higher than the norms on all four scales, except for actors scoring equal to the norm on Introvertive Anhedonia.

2) Actors were lower than the comedians on Cognitive Disorganisation, Introvertive Anhedonia, Impulsive Non-conformity but equal on Unusual Experiences.

3) Female comedians and actors scored higher than male comedians on all scales except for Introvertive Anhedonia, where they were actually lower than the males.

The study supports the notion that comedians, like other creative people, are high on psychosis traits. The high scores of comedians in all psychotic traits do not mean that comedians (or actors) are psychotic or have mental problems. This is just a survey and not a clinical diagnosis. However, the results might suggest that psychotic characteristics are the basis of stand-up comedy, or that people who pursue comedy as a career (remember, most of the subjects in this study were amateurs) have some characteristics of people suffering from schizophrenia or mania. What is perhaps surprising is the very high scores comedians achieved on these scales compared to other creative people.

The authors interpret the results as showing a strong tendency toward being bipolar. On one hand, the comedians scored high on antisocial and depressive traits, but on the other hand, they scored high on the manic trait, which if true, does characterize people suffering from bipolar. It is important to note that the traits described “represent healthy equivalents of cognitive and temperamental variations which, in pathological form, predispose to and mediate the symptoms of psychotic illness” as the authors put it.

The authors also mention that two of the scales, Unusual Experiences, and Cognitive Disorganisation are associated with creative thinking and generating unusual ideas, traits important for a successful stand-up comedian.

To me, the results of the study illustrate the unique lifestyle of comedians that I discussedpreviously. On one hand, they have to work hard and travel, mostly alone. This part can be very depressive and lonely. On the other hand, being on stage can be a manic experience if the comedian is successful. If he or she fails, or if the performance is sometimes good and other times bad, the changes in mood are reasonable (though again, not necessarily to the extreme of a person clinically diagnosed with bipolar).

 

 

 

Note: So here is the truth... pleny of people are becoming comedians and that's what happens... when comedy faces reality God Fucks you over with Anxiety, Depression, Stress and so on and so on...

 

 

The 12 Ways Narcissists Make You Think They’re Important

New research shows how people high in narcissism use the “sandbagging” strategy.

 

 

 

 

Have you ever noticed that some people you work with or interact with socially underplay their chances of succeeding? Perhaps they go into a situation in which their abilities will be put to the test, such as a entering a contest to get the most sales in the upcoming month, or putting together a meal for an important family gathering. Maybe they announce they have a first date with a match made through an online dating site. Rather than predict a positive outcome in these situations, they put on a show of looking ill-prepared or incompetent. They claim that they're doomed to fail, because they lack the necessary skills, people or otherwise, to achieve a positive outcome. Yet, you also have suspected for a while that these individuals seem to be quite self-centered and love to grab the limelight. Whey, then, would they go out of their way to seem ill-equipped to handle a challenge?

 

New research by University of North Texas psychologist Michael Barnett and colleagues (2018) suggests that people high in narcissism engage in this self-handicapping presentation strategy as a twisted way of getting you to think that they truly are terrific. Their study, which was conducted on a college student sample of 818 participants, was based on the idea that self-handicapping, or what they call “sandbagging,” is just one more way that people high in narcissism manipulate how others regard them. Although testing this concept on a college student sample might seem to limit its applicability to the broader population, it is consistent with some of the earliest theories of personality. By underplaying their strengths, according to theorists such as Alfred Adler and Karen Horney, narcissists can’t possibly fail. If they don’t win at a situation, they can show that they didn’t expect to anyhow. If they do win, then they look all that much more amazing to those who witness their glory.

 

The concept of sandbagging as a psychological self-presentation strategy was tested by Central Michigan University’s Brian Gibson and Minnesota State University (Mankato)’s Daniel Sachau in a 2000 study that described and validated a 12-item measure. Gibson and Sachau define sandbagging as “a self-presentational strategy involving the false claim or feigned demonstration of inability used to create artificially low expectations for the sandbagger’s performance” (p. 56). Although the origins of the term are unclear (possibly related to building dams, horse-racing, or acts of physical aggression), it’s a concept familiar in the world of “coaches and card-players.” In a press conference prior to a big game, a head coach will talk down, instead of up,