In this week's study, we focused on looking at the role of gender from different perspectives. Satirizing gender through comedy, Nanette, Hannah Gadsby's critically acclaimed stand-up comedy spectacular, addresses important social justice problems like gender violence, sexual assault, and homophobia. She attacks stand-up comedy as a masculine cultural form along the way, painstakingly exposing the boundaries of satire and speaking the truths we're reluctant to admit for fear of losing our hilarity. Satire necessitates a lighthearted tone and aims to inspire laughter.
The use of humor as a tool for serious criticism may diminish the importance of human rights issues such as those raised by Gadsby. For example, early in the show she humorously discusses a time when a man mistook her for a man and threatened her to talk to his girlfriend. Upon discovering that Gadsby was a woman, the man backed off. "Oh I'm sorry!" he exclaimed, followed by "I don't hit women." Now, the audience can laugh at both the man's mistake and Gadsby's failure to reach the heterosexual status quo. That is, the joke invokes the assumption that "women are women and men are men" and suggests that this identity outside of the gender binary is merely the stuff of jokes. Only later in the show, when Gadsby retells the joke, do we in the audience understand that this is not the whole story. In the full story, the man realizes his mistake, calls Gadsby a "lesbian" and brutally attacks her. " I think the visuals of stand-up comedy, an individual that captures everyone's attention, exaggerate the power that women actually have while ignoring the ways in which performing comedy can negatively affect women's self-worth. I don't think Gadsby trades trauma for laughs, but for jokes to tell her story, and telling her story is crucial.
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