Looking Seriously At Improvisational Comedians: An Existential-Phenomenological Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For all their ability to make us laugh, many comedians report severe struggles with mental health. Even so, this reality does not deter a growing number of improvisational (improv) comedians from endorsing applications of their craft in wellbeing-oriented workshops for the public, which claim to leverage the beneficial side effects of learning improv comedy to help with a growing list of psychological ailments like social anxiety and autism. This existential-phenomenological study explored the complex dynamics of wellbeing among eight professional improvisers (five men and three women) to illuminate the psychological vulnerabilities and resiliencies of this unique subset of the comedy community. Qualitative analysis yielded six common themes that conveyed the beneficial personal "by-products" of doing improv, which included the opportunity for adults to play, the joy of collaborative relationships, increased comfort with risk, improved confidence, a focus on positivity, and a revitalizing effect on emotional health, self-image, and sense of purpose. Stressors unique to the business aspect of improv, but not improv itself, were also revealed. Results provide valuable insights both for improvisers and those interested in the application of improv in clinical settings.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.097 | 0.017 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".