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John Mulaney is double legacy Georgetown University alum, so we can’t really measure his IQ / credential. Westchester is one of the lowest ranking universities in America. Your link mentions Seinfeld, one of the all-time greats, and he went to a CUNY ranked #158 of us college. Our version of Mitchell and Webb is Key & Peele and they both went to pretty middling schools.
Now this really seems like moving the goalposts. First you claim that Shane Gillis didn't do well in school and would score poorly in a verbal IQ test. Then I point out to you that he actually holds an undergraduate degree, and the claim becomes "yeah but not from an elite institution though". And @roystgnr claims that Westchester is a middling college (and cites a source), rather than one of the lowest-ranked institutions in the country.
Roystgnr is right, I misread the rankings. But yeah, it doesn’t make sense that a top comedian would attend a school at this ranking when comedy is so meritocratic, unless the ability comes from something unrelated to g
There's the old saying "half of success is just showing up", the insight of which I didn't appreciate until I started trying to book gigs for my band. I suspect a major (and underrated) factor in becoming a successful comedian is temperament. Being a successful comedian means going on tour for large chunks of the year and not seeing your family and loved ones for months at a time. It means working late and sleeping in during the day. It probably means drinking a lot more than the average person would. It means being exceptionally thick-skinned (like customer service, standup is a rare profession in which complete strangers feel entitled to interrupt you mid-sentence and insult you to your face; unlike customer service, they're drunk more often than not while they do so). It means turning in an engaging, high-energy performance regardless of whether you're hungover, sleep-deprived, jet-lagged or all three. And like every entertainment career, it means doing for this minimal (and variable) reward for many years until you get something going.
Few people are cut out for this lifestyle. I'd hazard a guess that successful standups are those that trend above-average in g, and who have the kind of temperament where the lifestyle described above appeals to them.
From what I've heard, it's also an Always Be Closing job; gigs have both high uncertainty, need to be constantly negotiated well in advance, and have a feast-or-famine nature.
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