Psychoanalyzing Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, which is streaming on Netflix, is redundant. In this kaleidoscopic, cubistic, fractal
performance piece, Gadsby psychoanalyzes humor – she tears it apart and
rebuilds it and then abandons it. She
plays the part of the professor – explaining humor – and you’d think if she had
to explain her jokes she wouldn’t be a very good comedian – but she is. And a confident one. And she takes her jokes apart because she is
uncomfortable with them as a means of connecting us. Self-deprecating humor on the part of a
marginalized person is, she says, not humility but humiliating. She is dissatisfied with jokes as a means of
telling what she calls her story – they preserve trauma rather than releasing
her (and us) from it – they prevent her from evolving – and instead she wants to engage
in a different way of telling her story, and she does that, using the comic stage
as a bully pulpit, but also as an analytic couch, telling her audience what has
actually happened and what she feels in response to that in order to heal herself,
but also to promote our healing – not in a touchy feely, let’s all have an
encounter group hug kind of way – in fact she hates hugs with strangers- but in
a “Let’s get down to business and figure out how to attack the problems that we
need to work on” kind of way– with the primary problem being figuring out how
to talk with each other when we have strong feelings towards and about each
other.
Gadsby reveals humor to be a two part means of addressing an
issue. There is a set-up – some kind of
tension – and this gets “resolved” by a punch-line – but the punch line, she
says is not a true resolution - it is a means of reducing tension, but it does
not go on, as a story does, to produce a new way of seeing the situation –
there is not a resolution of the tension, but a preservation of it because it
gets sidestepped, not directly resolved.
In psychoanalytic terms, we defend against the tension – we use it as a
spring board to a new place that is really just a different version of the
place we left. We have rearranged the
deck chairs on the Titanic, but not actually solved the problem.
Gadsby ingeniously demonstrates this by taking two passes at
her comic material. She first gives a “straight”
rendition of lesbian themed humor told as first person stories, then she
returns to that material and exposes what has been hidden in it to make it
funny – and we see that the material is actually much more painful and
difficult, but also more vivid and real, than in the “edited for humor”
version. And Gadsby herself, or should I
say Hannah, is transformed from a performer who is manipulating us into a raw
and real person who is communicating uncomfortable truths – and as she does
this the camera moves in to take the tightest shots – and we are not allowed to
look away.
But Gadsby is not satisfied with communicating with us what
it feels like to be her. She wants us to
get that, viscerally, and I think we do, in so far as we are able to handle the
discomfort that is involved with that, but she doesn’t want us to stay stuck
there – even though she won’t relieve us of that. Instead she opens the door to our moving
forward – but doesn’t do it for us. She
points us in the direction that she believes we should travel – through the
genius of Art History – to what it is that we need to do to help her – and therefore to help ourselves. And she implores us
to do that – to love one another - so that the pulpit feels a bit like a Sunday
morning one, and we are now being led, not in the uncovering the meaning of
scripture, but the meaning of the culture we are part of. We are worshiping at the altar of the comic
turned, what? Priest? Artist? Confessor? Analysand? Analyst?
For what it is worth, I think that Freud would have agreed
with a lot that Gadsby is observing about humor, but she would have
schooled him on the interpersonal aspects.
He was more interested in how humor worked within the individual mind –
what that mind finds funny. He likened
humor to dreams and noted that the same mechanisms that make dreams work do the
same for humor. Thomas Ogden then noted
that not all dreams help us move forward.
Many of them, like Gadsby’s concern with humor, end up keeping us stuck
in rehearsing over and over the same material – keeping us stuck in trauma, as
it were. These Ogden distinguishes from
generative dreams – dreams that move us forward – that give us new room to
operate or, in Gadsby’s language – new stories to tell – or new ways to move
the stories forward.
I think Nanette is an important work. It calls attention to the conservative nature
of humor – which often feels edgy, but more often than not, humor conserves rather than
tests or moves the edges it runs into. I
am thinking about assigning this video to my history of psychology class to watch as an
assignment. I think it would help them
realize that, just as the history of art is useful to this comedian, the
history of psychology may come in handy someday… Ok, that was lame, but on some level
true. More importantly, I think that being grounded in who
it is that we are which means knowing where it is that we have come from can
help us understand where it is that we are going. And we can realize some of the flaws in the
culture that we have inherited by hearing from those at the margins. Plus it will be relevant to the section on women in psychology and working to help the students understand how women have been treated.
The
New York Times article that accompanies
the write up of the Nanette performance looks at the way that comedy has
become ubiquitous in our culture. Here
at home, stand-up comedy streams from our television – especially when the
eldest reluctant step-daughter is in residence, on a pretty regular basis. Stand-up comics have also long been the stars
of sitcoms – most notably Seinfeld
and now there is a retrospective comedy The
Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, that imagines a female comedian who could go toe to
toe with Lenny Bruce. Cable, with Comedy
Central and then streaming video allowed the comic the bits on TV to break the
confines of the host’s opening monologue and the five minute windows on late
night talk shows where it used to be sequestered (though it was also, of course
in comedy clubs that a few accessed). We,
the viewing audience, have now been admitted to the clubs and the stages where
comedy is being performed, because it is now filmed and streamed.
Gadsby’s thesis is that her humor preserves her trauma
rather than being a vehicle for her to work it through. I think that this applies to humor more
generally, not just to hers. Comics ask
us to laugh at them or at others – in either case, they are frequently
implicitly telling us what not to do – don’t slip on this banana peel because
others will laugh at you. And when you
tell someone what not to do, you are telling them to stay in their lane. The not too subtly coded message is, “Don’t
do this, or you will be ridiculed.”
Comedy, then, becomes a vehicle for maintaining the status quo through managing shame. We laugh at the way that others have been
ashamed – and by laughing at them we distance ourselves from our own
shame. But we also preserve the shaming
voice – the voice that makes fun of anyone on the playground who differs from
the norm in any way – including in extraordinarily beautiful and productive
ways. From Gadsby’s position, we take
the person we are laughing at as representing not me rather than connecting
with and identifying with them as someone like ourselves (frequently this
occurs at the very same moment that we are recognizing ourselves in them, “Yup,
I’ve done that, too. Wasn’t that
stupid. I’ll never do that again,” when,
of course we will). The distancing - the
labelling of the humorous as something that is not me – maintains the laughed
at material as shameful and keeps us from owning that material and engaging with it in
ways that would allow us to address them – e.g. I will work to prevent things
like that from happening to anyone vs. I won’t ever put myself in a situation like that
again.
Gadsby takes angry straight white male comedians to task by calling them the canaries in the mineshaft.
If their lives aren’t good, she poses, what does that say for the rest
of us. Well, I’ve got news for you
Hannah: it is challenging to live all of our lives – even those of us with
great privilege aren’t always up to the task – and she cites many examples of
those who have failed miserable at the task.
Her concern – and I share it – is that many of these inhuman people –
take Harvey Weinstein or Woody
Allen for instance – have been responsible for our stories. Meaning, their inhumanity must needs have
polluted the story making that we rely on to find heroes with whom we can
identify. Again, Hannah, I’ve got news
for you. We have a long way to go, baby. The stories that these people have produced reflect a culture that includes and in many cases supports toxic behavior. Telling new stories will contribute to, but also be a result in shifts in a culture whose roots are very very deep. This won't come easy.
A minor fear is that blaming those who have privilege and
have abused it sets up the idea that just getting privilege and somehow not
abusing it will lead to happiness. This seems
to be the driving force behind the Gwyneth
Paltrow GOOP movement. Fortunately,
Hannah states that women are every bit as corruptible as men – I think when we
see this though, we might say, “Oh, look, you can’t let them run things. Look what a mess they make when they do that,”
while we seem to have given many straight white males license to do things even
when they have made tremendous messes.
But I have wandered away from the main point – doing things well is hard
work. There is a kernel of truth to
Gwyneth Paltrow’s position that her perfect life has to do (in part) with hard
choices and hard work that she has done.
We should use our privilege to work on improving our own lives and those
of others in an active way – not just by buying things that make us feel good,
but by doing the hard but important work of connecting with those around us.
The set-up in Nanette is that this piece is named after a
woman that Hannah though she would find interesting enough to devote an hour of
material to. Nah.
Nanette wasn’t that interesting.
So who was? It turns out that it
was Hannah – Hannah and her relationship with the world – including the people
in it who have abused her, the people who laugh with her, and, perhaps most
importantly, the people who have supported her.
And even more centrally, it is Hannah herself. Who is she?
And what, it turns out, has comedy done to her? And what is it doing to all of us? Yes, as she says, laughter is good medicine,
but penicillin is better. What will it
take for us to continue to move, in our incredibly slow and bewilderingly
chaotic way, out of our messes? I agree with Hannah that love is the basic ingredient. And I
am appreciative that Hannah has pointed us in that direction. It will be interesting to chart where this
leads – it feels a little like it felt when Lorde burst on the scene – another underprivileged person from the southern hemisphere - is this
kind of work sustainable when the star is in the public eye?
Gadsby has decided that she will continue with comedy – or
something – after all. As she said on Jimmy
Fallon, she wrote this show to quit comedy.
She did not expect it to be a hit – she expected it to be her swan
song. But now that it has taken off she
can be an idiot and quit or be a hypocrite – and she is choosing to be a
hypocrite. Of course, those she brings
to task are all hypocrites, too. Not
that she doesn’t recognize this.
Hopefully her self-awareness will help her stay a bit above the fray…
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