Hannah Gadsby: Celebrity Stand Up, Trauma, and the Meta Theatrics of Persona Construction

Abstract

This essay examines the work of stand-up performer Hannah Gadsby in relation to persona, extending the conventional reach of persona studies to the realm of live performance and comedy. The author analyses Hannah Gadsby’s risky decision to kill off her widely adored comic persona in her 2017 show Nanette, replacing it with a persona that shot her to global celebrity and changed the power dynamics with her audiences. The essay investigates Gadsby’s contention that stand-up is bad for her mental health and is predicated on an abusive relationship with audiences. It considers her strategies of comic unmaking and remaking in the contexts of women working in a sexist industry within misogynist societies. It also interrogates Gadsby’s dramaturgies of foregrounding persona creation and the performative dialogic of ‘face’ or ‘mask.’ Gadsby’s postmodern deconstruction of her own comic artistry and her exposure of the limits of stand-up as a form are examined through a new concept of meta-persona.

Introduction to the special issue: Genres of Rape and Putting Rape Into Genre: Sexual Violence and TV After #MeToo

“…Amber Day considers how Nanette actively theorizes the genre of the stand-up comedy—and then transforms it in order to open up space in the public sphere for new forms of rape survivor testimony, critiquing the comedy industry in the process. Building on recent scholarship on the show (Brown 2020; Gilmore and Elizabeth 2019; Krefting 2019; Luckhurst 2019), Day argues that Nanette bundles a critique of the comedy industry and of gendered violence through genre transformations that expand the public sphere (Kuipers 2011) for survivor testimony. Sujata Moorti considers another comedic genre, the sitcom, by exploring how Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt transforms the “situation” of trauma and rape culture into comedy, something that is progressive in its deflecting away from triggering trauma sensationalism and whose Netflix streaming medium made it possible to tap into #MeToo activism in new ways.…”

Gender and Genre in Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette

“…She implies that the #MeToo movement has encouraged women to re-evaluate and re-tell their own stories. Nanette further builds on that movement with Gadsby asserting that she must “find a way of communicating the traumatic narratives of her life that she had always edited out of her material” (Luckhurst 2019, 60).…”

Role of Personas in Political Marketing in Canada

“…Many in the field share a broad conception of personas as a performative presentation of a common self, harking back to the term's etymological roots as a reference to the masks worn in ancient Greek dramas (Nöe 2012;Marshall & Barbour 2015 p. 2). Literary scholars may seek to examine the construction of personas by writers (Duncan 2019;Luckhurst 2019). Psychologists are inspired by the work of Carl Jung who examined personas as a mask through which one feigns individuality, acting out a role to connect to others while also concealing the subconscious self (Jung 1969).…”