Hannah Gadsby: Emotional Capital and Affective Economies in Stand-Up Comedy
Being a stand-up comic requires skills: the ability to craft jokes and perform them; the capacity to “read the room” and adapt material during the performance; and business savvy needed to network with fellow comics and industry gatekeepers. Comedians are performers as much as they are business entr...
Saved in:
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
European Association for American Studies
2024-09-01
|
| Series: | European Journal of American Studies |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/22636 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | Being a stand-up comic requires skills: the ability to craft jokes and perform them; the capacity to “read the room” and adapt material during the performance; and business savvy needed to network with fellow comics and industry gatekeepers. Comedians are performers as much as they are business entrepreneurs for their own brand. Negotiating these demands requires emotional capital which, like other forms of capital, is unequally distributed and identity-contingent. High levels of performances of emotional capital can inform success by ensuring good working relationships with others in the industry and developing content that will effectively elicit laughter across communities. Comics attuned to patterns of comedy patronage understand that they are selling entertainment as well as an emotional experience and learn to comply with affective dictates of this performance genre. But not all comics are compliant, nor can they be when affective demands posing as natural are meant to favor cis-gendered, heterosexual, white, able-bodied men. By contrast, Hannah Gadsby is a gender non-conforming, neurodiverse, white, lesbian stand-up comedian whose very existence in comedy venues as well as their comic material itself troubles traditional constructions of emotional capital necessary for effective comedy performance while simultaneously defying the emotions typically demanded from comic performances. They resist and are sometimes unable to deploy the kinds of emotional capital presumed necessary for securing success in the industry. Gadsby’s perceived deficiencies in emotional capital tell us much about the ascendant affective economies circulating today—in green rooms and on stages across the world. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1991-9336 |