1. Introduction: Affective Economies in Stand-Up Comedy

2While Hannah Gadsby isn’t the first comic to tackle weighty, even traumatic topics on stage—think Cameron Esposito discussing her own experience of sexual assault in Rape Jokes (2018) or Patton Oswalt sharing about the loss of his wife in Annihilation (2017)—their metacommentary on the emotional conventions of stand-up comedy and refusal to comply with such affective mandates make their work distinctive. Oswalt, Esposito, and other comedians deal with heavy material but eventually reward their patient audience with laughter, relieving the prolonged tension associated with serious content. Sara Ahmed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, begins with the question: “What do emotions do?” (4). Quite a lot actually. Emotions are especially powerful because they do not reside in the individuals or possessions but rather bind groups together (for better or for worse). Ahmed writes: “In other words, it is the failure of emotions to be located in a body, object, or figures that allows emotions to (re)produce or generate the effects they do” (“Affective Economies” 124). Emotions have effects with economic underpinnings. All manner of consumer goods appeal to consumer emotions when marketing their products, and comedy is no exception. Societies have rendered emotions valuable or precious when they serve as tools or forms of intelligence that catalyze forms of capital—economic, cultural, and social. As Ahmed explains:

The story of evolution is narrated not only as the story of the triumph of reason, but of the ability to control emotions, and to experience the ‘appropriate’ emotions at different times and places (Elias 1978). Within contemporary culture, emotions may be represented as good or better than thought but only insofar as they are re-presented as a form of intelligence, as “tools” that can be used by subjects in the project of life and career enhancement. (Cultural Politics 3)

3If using the right emotions at the right time yields capital, the logic of capitalism suggests that it is in one’s best interest to do so. For comedians, their jobs require the use of emotion as a tool for professional success on stage with audience members and as they secure stage time with industry executives and fellow comics.

4There are best practices for affective engagement that bear the promises of success and profit. These rules vary across professions, and savvy folks learn them and work to abide by them. These dispositional qualities can be described as performances of emotional capital, “a tripartite concept composed of emotion-based knowledge, management skills, and capacities to feel that links self-processes and resources to group membership and social location” (Cottingham 452). This analysis begins by posing the following questions: What are the affective expectations in stand-up comedy on stage and off? Can everyone fulfill those expectations, and how might different positionalities disadvantage comedians seeking success in the industry? After defining and applying the Bordieu-adjacent concept of emotional capital to the stand-up comedy industry, I examine critiques and pitfalls of the scholarship published on emotional capital. I prioritize discussions of gender because it remains central to prior theorizing—in problematic ways—and I center discussions of race because it has been neglected in the literature. To further explore the affective demands of stand-up comedy, particularly how they, for Hannah Gadsby, vary across gender, sexuality, race, and ability, I draw from their memoir Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation (2022) and track some key discourses in audience reception of their stand-up comedy specials, particularly after Netflix aired Nanette (2018). Audience reception of Gadsby’s special Nanette reveals the consequences for comedians who shirk these expected affective conventions and illuminates the ways such expectations vary across races and genders.

2. Defining Emotional Capital

5The term emotional capital draws from Pierre Bourdieu’s oft-referred to concepts of cultural capital and social capital as distinctive from economic capital (see Bourdieu 241-258). In the simplest of terms, economic capital is accrued through money and property, cultural capital through education and training, social capital through one’s connections, social network, and status, and emotional capital through knowing and expressing the appropriate emotions that will yield the best outcomes, namely profit and professional/personal success. Bourdieu’s cultural and social capital are not the same as economic capital, but they are linked: we may accrue social and cultural capital because we have money, and social and cultural capital bears the promise of yielding economic capital over time. Though this may be concealed at times, another way of putting this: economic capital is both a condition and a product of these other forms of capital. Furthermore, forms of capital are setting-specific or context contingent: The setting informs the knowledges, connections, and emotions most valued/prized. For example, the affective requirements of a professor engaged in teaching versus a hairdresser on the job versus a stand-up comedian performing a set are all very different. Since I have performed in all these capacities, I understand it is imperative to know different things to be optimally successful in each environment. We have previously thought about what knowledges (cultural capital) and what networks (social capital) best situate us to advance professionally, without factoring in the emotional skills/attributes that serve to advance an individual at a particular time and place.

6Drawing from Bordieuan theories, in 1981 social scientist Helga Nowotny devised the term emotional capital (EC) and defined the term as love and affection simultaneously, identifying it as a distinctly female resource relegated to the private sphere. Over the next thirty years, EC theorizing like Nowotny’s and other scholars focused on the family (Hochschild; Reay; Feeney and Lemay) and more recently on education (Manion; Zembylas; Reid; Wong) as the primary and exclusive sites where scholars made emotional capital operational. For example, some studies use EC to understand educational inequalities; Yi-Lee Wong looked at the emotional capital of community college students in Hong Kong and their parents to understand how EC is transmitted from one generation to another and how this is inflected by socio-economic status (2021). Lately it has become a buzz word in the realm of business journalism; there are dozens of articles offering best practices for accruing emotional capital in the workplace usually conceived as predominantly white, middle-class, professional settings in the US (Trades by Matt).

7These articles define EC through competencies such as: self-esteem, self-regulation, self-motivation, self-reliance, relational agility, and optimism. In 2016, sociologist Marci Cottingham published a literature review and analysis of the scholarship thus far, generating the most current and valuable exploration of the term. She centers occupational environments as central sites that require their own set of emotion-based knowledges, skills, and abilities to feel to achieve success. Along with other scholars focusing on healthcare settings (Wingfield; Stacey; Snyder), Cottingham examines the pink-collar profession of nursing. This maneuvering away from family and education as gendered sites of socialization and towards occupational settings, more generally, expands our thinking about where and how professionals mobilize emotional capital.

8Obviously, many people have defined and applied emotional capital in different albeit related ways. However, I prefer Cottingham’s nuanced definition of emotional capital as “embodied cultural capital” that might be best explained as “a tripartite concept inclusive of emotion-based knowledges, management skills and emotional self-reflexivity” (452). Emotion-based knowledges entail knowing what emotions to exhibit and when (and for how long). For comedians this is attending to what emotions are commonly valued in their professional interactions and on stage. For professional business interactions, one might ask: what kinds of emotional competencies do they need to generate and promote their stand-up? This can mean many things including being likeable during interviews, establishing friendly relations with the people booking night clubs and televisual platforms for stand-up, and knowing how to manage affective elements of social media platforms in ways that grow a fan base. For female-identified people that includes building a brand that successfully communicates that they are super relatable, silly, sexy, and non-threatening. Cis-gendered men have a buffet of emotions that can inspire their promotional work with impunity: angry, sad, strong, loser, hot, goofy, arrogant, stoner, womanizer, family-man, etc. Jim Jeffries and Doug Stanhope can be the drunken social critic, Ryan Hamilton and Brian Regan can be the bumbling doofus, Rich Vos and Robert Kelly can be the unapologetic asshole, etc. On stage, 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. The difference between off-stage and on lies between what emotional aptitudes are required of white, lesbian, genderqueer, neurodiverse Gadsby for securing and promoting their work versus those required on stage while performing. At times, this overlaps as with the emotional work necessary to be likeable with fans, club managers, and journalists alike.

9Management skills are the strategic affective responses appropriate to broker success in the environment. Here, there is an emphasis on the “doing,” that is using emotions as a form of managing others. Strong management skills ensure success on and off stage for comedians. Management skills in professional interactions in stand-up include building good working relationships with other comics and powerful people in the industry. This entails being sociable or seen as fun to be around, a willingness to hang out before and after shows, and the ability to “take a joke,” which means laughing along with others even if you are the butt of the joke. For women and minorities this also means that speaking up about racism/sexism/homophobia can alienate people in the industry. Gadsby’s neurodiversity is one that automatically puts them at a disadvantage in the business of comedy. They prefer being alone, so hanging out all night with the crew isn’t enjoyable. Notably, they are able but not always willing to respond to all social cues and write jokes that attest to being socially awkward (Douglas). In their memoir, they describe attending a Netflix Emmy’s party where they were approached by Jodie Foster, Jennifer Anniston, and John Stamos (among others), but rather than capitalize on their admiration to parley future professional connections or collaborations, Gadsby stared at the white carpet beneath their feet in horror. “What kind of monster would choose white carpet for an outdoor event?” they thought (Gadsby 12). Most of their time at the event was spent fastidiously monitoring the growing dinginess of the carpet due to foot traffic. Gadsby’s refusal to respond to social cues does not mean they haven’t learned these knowledges or management skills. In Gadsby’s case, they know what they should do but opt not to use emotions as a form of managing others. They admit: “I knew I was behaving abnormally” (11; emphasis mine). Despite knowing what to do, they resist the “doing” and reject reaping the benefits of exercising emotional capital by managing others. Importantly, Gadsby does find a way to turn their own social awkwardness into comedy currency by inviting readers of their memoir to chuckle at the faux paus.

10Management skills look differently when a comedian performs on stage. Comedians must have the ability to “read the room” and manage audience responses, take an ongoing emotional inventory of audience, and develop content that will effectively elicit laughter across communities adhering to affective conventions of the art form. There are intense moments in Nanette when Gadsby excoriates stand-up as a flawed form, whose affective rules don’t allow them to tell the full store of their traumas and, if they do, compel them to resolve any tension with laughter, thereby undermining the gravity of the trauma:

Remember that story I told about that young man who almost beat me up? It was a very funny story. It was very funny. I made a lot of people laugh about his ignorance, and the reason I could do that is because I’m very good at this job. I actually am pretty good at controlling the tension. And I know how to balance that to get the laugh at the right place. But in order to balance the tension in the room with that story, I couldn’t tell that story as it actually happened. Because I couldn’t tell the part of the story where that man realized his mistake. And he came back, and he said [yelling] ‘Ah nah I get it. You’re a lady faggot! I’m allowed to beat the shit out of youse!’ And he did. He beat the shit out of me, and nobody stopped him! (58:54-59:40)

12Emotional self-reflexivity means to understand social locations and their connections to networks of power, or what Cottingham articulates as “[c]apacities to feel that link[] self-processes and resources to group membership and social location,” which, like other forms of capital, is unequally distributed and identity-contingent (452). She proposes there is a “direct relationship between macro-structures and micro-resources;” in other words, emotional capital is connected to power structures (452). Your ability to have EC or not is causally linked to your social identities and their relationship to institutional inequalities governing access to resources. Ahmed puts it this way:

It is not difficult to see how emotions are bound up with the securing of social hierarchy: emotions become attributes of bodies as a way of transforming what is ‘lower’ or ‘higher’ into bodily traits. So emotionality as a claim about a subject or a collective is clearly dependent on relations of power, which endow ‘others’ with meaning and value. (Cultural Politics 4)

13For example, racial hierarchy accords more value to those who are white—this plays out as colorism wherein the lighter the complexion, the better. Gender socialization confers value to men’s experiences and knowledges while devaluing the same for women. In All Joking Aside, I argue that audiences are acculturated quite literally to not buy-in to women’s perspectives—there are no cultural rewards and thus no economic incentive to do so (Krefting). Similarly, comedy studies scholar Stephanie Brown interrogates the way “authenticity” functions as a floating signifier steeped in the emotional responses of audiences that endow male comics as more relatable than female comics. Stratified access to emotional capital can delimit professional success for minoritized comedians, even as this system poses as natural, as when someone says, his comedy just felt more “authentic” (Brown).

14Real proficiency in emotional self-reflexivity stems from an awareness of how you fit into power relations and catering to others’ expectations that you perform affectively according to your social designation as sexed, raced, gendered, classed, abled, etc. It is troubling and fascinating to see what values and images are most embraced by those consuming comedic entertainment. Oftentimes this becomes audience enjoyment of caricatures of groups of people (see Krefting All Joking Aside; “Minority Report”). It is any racialized comedian catering to white racist imaginings (stereotypes) of who they are, e.g., an Asian-American female comic going on about how good they are at math but how bad they are at driving. It’s any differently-abled comedian inviting folks to laugh at them or capitalizing on ableist tropes of the disabled as asexual, heroic, and/or an object to be pitied. There are cultural and financial rewards for such performances. And there are those that challenge these expectations. For example, many Black women work hard not to express anger in occupational settings because they don’t want to be typecast as the “angry Black woman” (aka the Sapphire), a controlling image in media for generations.

15Hannah Gadsby understands their social positioning in the world and the expectations placed upon them to behave according to that social positioning. Rather than reaping the profit and professional accolades waiting for them if they do so, they openly criticize power relations, like those that would excuse a man for publicly beating them and the crowd of witnesses who refused to intervene. In their own words: “And that was not homophobia pure and simple people, that was gendered. If I’d have been feminine, that would not have happened. I am incorrectly female. I am incorrect, and that is a punishable offense” (1:00:04-1:00:16). Whether detailing abuses suffered, the Western obsession with Picasso despite his penchant for underage girls, or the gendered history of the color blue, they use comedy to skewer—or as they say, “needle”—our tacit assent and overt compliance to the power structures that shape our identities and interactions. In this exploration of how one cashes in on emotional capital, Hannah Gadsby keeps rejecting participation in the comedy profession in ways that capitalize on a particular variant of EC that reinforces hierarchy and gives primacy to white, cis-gendered, male performances of EC meant to secure professional success.

2. Emotional Capital: Critiques/Pitfalls

16Scholarship focused on emotional capital has much to offer anyone thinking through analyses of production and the political economy, but it is not without its weaknesses. Based on analyses of extant literature on emotional capital, I offer two central critiques—one that challenges how scholars gender EC and one that proffers concern that most scholarship on EC eclipses any theorizing on race. First, scholars’ early theorizing links emotional capital to gender as a distinctively female resource or something that women are more facile in accessing based on gender socialization (Reay). Arlie Russell Hochschild, in 1979, talked about it as emotion management for women two years before Nowotny coined the term EC. It has also been theorized as gender-neutral in occupational environments (Cahill; Schweingruber and Berns). I argue that EC is always gendered and there is no environment that nullifies its gendered effects, including (and especially) on stage, performing comedy.

17Audiences have different affective expectations and allowances for women than they do for men. According to Gadsby in their memoir, the public rewarding men for exhibiting anger is a “style known as ‘angry archetypal man having a monologue.’ Which is what many would call ‘pure comedy’” (22). There is a moment in Nanette when Gadsby reflects on gendered public responses to expressions of anger on stage (other women and their own). They report that when they exhibit anger they are “a miserable lesbian ruining all the fun and banter” but when men do it they are “heroes of free speech” (58:16-58:20). When gendered expectations for affect are not met, there are consequences to those that do not comply. For stand-up comedy, those consequences are material or economic. In Douglas, Gadsby notes that a woman’s face at rest is a “bitchface” because she’s not smiling and a man’s face at rest is having “very important thoughts you’d best not interrupt them having” (26:15-26:25). Women who are not smiling are mad and men who are not smiling are pensive. To conform to social expectations, then, women must smile, and men need not do anything at all. This is one example of the affective laboring that goes on all the time as minoritized professionals navigate the business world.

18Gender socialization has led to the repetition of what one might call the male deficit argument, i.e., people assume men as lacking EC and/or being emotionless (Gillies; Virkki). On the contrary, men can have every possible emotion. There are no biological sex differences inhibiting affective capabilities and competencies, but there are social practices that acculturate folks to gendered emoting (Manion; Ridgeway). Men may not express certain emotions for fear of being emasculated. Gender socialization is geographically and culturally contingent but, in the U.S., men are socialized not to exhibit certain emotions like grief, love, gratitude, fear, and vulnerability. Ironically, there is also a social benefit or reward mechanism when men exhibit these emotions, if they do so sparingly. Common emotions exhibited by men that society condones include lust, anger, pride, jealousy, competitiveness, etc. Men are expressing emotions all the time, but we don’t register them as emotions. It’s curious to see which emotions even count as such in broader culture. In Douglas, Gadsby criticizes this hypocrisy and gendered binary—men are emotion-less/non-hormonal and women are emotional/hormonal. They joke “Look, I’ve been known to nibble dark chocolate on a full moon. I don’t know. Witchcraft? [laughter] But I’ve never had to punch a door [laughter]. So, we all have our things, fellas [cheers and applause]” (36:22-36:33). The very statement: “Boys will be boys,” they argue, is cultural admission that boys cannot control their emotions and instead, hold women accountable for men’s emotional reactivity. In pro-rape cultures this is called victim blaming.

19Relatedly, scholars conflate emotional capital with practice (emphasis on the doing). Cottingham argues that we need to think of EC as a resource and practice. Another way of putting this is to imagine the difference between emotional capacity versus expression—as when Gadsby knew they were acting atypically at the Netflix Emmy party but elected not to express the appropriate emotions with celebrities at the event. Scholarly elisions to nuance this gap—between knowing and doing—wrongfully reinforces gendered affective social conventions. Put differently, this maneuver neglects to consider that men have the capacity for emotions but have been acculturated or socially conditioned not to express the emotion, which is why the male deficit argument surfaces regularly.

20The other critique of this body of literature that orbits around gender can be captured in the question: where is race in all of this? It is as problematic to argue that EC is unaffected by gender as it is to ignore the impact of constructions of race on EC. To center race in a discussion about emotional capital in the landscape of stand-up comedy acknowledges, as Raúl Pérez astutely argues, that our racial order and the racist humor informing that order “has long played, and continues to play, a powerful role in generating and maintaining racialized feelings, hierarchies, and worldviews” (5; emphasis mine). Race structures our reality—our expectations of emotion-based knowledges, management skills, and capacities to feel. The expression and management of emotions on stage for maximum success will be different for a Black comedian performing to a primarily white audience (outsider status) versus a primarily Black audience (insider status). Comedians of color must negotiate between who they are (micro level) and what their audience expects of them based on who they are (mezzo level). Racialized affective laboring that white people need not do to reap emotional capital is a hidden cost and disparity. Though I will focus on race here, all identity categories, whether ability, sexuality, class, or otherwise, inflect access to and performances of EC. Centering race in analyses of EC helps answer a key question in this inquiry, namely which positionalities are best poised to fulfill affective expectations yielding emotional capital.

21Ways of producing emotional capital are connected to the dominant subject positions responsible for creating political and social institutions and the behavioral protocols expected in them—in classrooms, hospitals, military barracks, and boardrooms. We all feel race (and by extension other identity categories like class, sexuality, gender, etc.) in ways specific to our social locations depending on whether those positionalities are dominant or subordinate. For example, being a person of color at a predominantly white institution of higher education means that in most spaces—classrooms, dorms, dining halls—people of color will be the minority, demographically and politically. In any interracial setting, there are power dynamics that racial minorities feel and in turn informs behaviors, e.g., comportment, diction, food and seating selections, contributions to discussions, etc. While this is culturally, geographically, and historically contingent, this example highlights that “races fashion an emotional subjectivity generally fitting of their location in the racial order” or caste system (Bonilla-Silva 2). There are many racial affective modes as well as an ascendant mode corresponding to who has power. Think of most corporate environments: they privilege male-read dispositional qualities and characteristics such as seniority, independence, arrogance, and competition. What appears as the natural constellation of affective abilities needed to navigate white-collar professions is linked to Eurocentric notions of androcentrism and whiteness.

22My best friend from high school is mixed race (Black and white) who often “passes” as white. She repeatedly experiences white people saying racist things because they believe they are only among other white people. When she explains who she is and why she is offended, those being rebuffed offer the common rejoinder: “you don’t act Black.” Her racialized presence (once exposed) changes how people act and what they say around her. Everyone, not just people of color, experiences “racialized emotions” or the “emotional weight of [our] categorical location” when interacting physically, virtually, or materially with people of different races/ethnicities (Bonilla-Silva 2). When white people accuse a person of color of “acting white,” they are policing someone’s performance of race that is, among other things, exhibiting an affect incongruent with their racial designation. Remember Ahmed’s point that one of the things that emotions do are to bind groups, or as she puts it, “align individuals with communities” (“Affective Economies” 119). In stand-up comedy there are affective expectations specific to your social location that, if you choose to fulfill them, bears the promise of success. I discussed this earlier as the pressure comedians of color feel to perform affectively according to their race and the rewards reaped for fulfilling stereotypes corresponding to a white racist imaginary about people of color. And white people (especially white men), wittingly or not, benefit from a racial affective economy that privileges white masculinist affect (see Krefting, All Joking Aside). It is impossible to detail the myriad ways EC is racialized over time and across communities, professions, and social interactions; suffice it to say, this untapped vein in research on EC is a deep and wide lacuna waiting to be filled.

4. Hannah Gadsby: Case Study

23If we agree that affective expectations are influenced by race (or gender, class, sexuality, etc.) and that there are rewards—emotional capital—for fulfilling affective conventions, then the next logical question to pose is: in what ways have we naturalized emotions in the comedy exchange that reify and replicate structural inequalities? Hannah Gadsby’s career and performances are useful for examining the economy of affect that privileges dominant modes of expression—white, wealthy, heteropatriarchal, aged but not too aged. In other words, Gadsby’s comedy and people’s reactions to that comedy offer concrete examples of how emotional capital normalizes dominant modes of affective expression and rewards minoritized affective expressions that conform to and reaffirm reigning social hierarchies.

24To address emotions as a form of capital illustrates how social, political, and economic institutions reproduce affective economies that systematically disadvantage minoritized peoples. Michalinos Zembylas, one of the scholars tackling emotional capital in educational fields, writes: “The struggle for possession of capital thus indicates not only the uneven distribution of available resources but also their circulation” (450). Zembylas’ ethnographic work in educational sites chart the ways “emotional practices of educators”—we can substitute educators for the folks in the stand-up comedy industry— “work to demarcate differences with the ethnic Other and transform emotional capital to cultural capital or social capital and vice versa; thus it is within this restricted social and political field that dominant national, social and cultural taxonomies are reproduced or occasionally destabilized” (454). For example, acknowledging one’s minoritized identities on stage is its own form of emotional labor that is not required of cis-gendered white men. In the absence of this social pressure, they have more time to develop the uniqueness of their approach to comedy which can distinguish them to audiences and industry folks, leading to greater professional success. In Nanette, Gadsby describes the requirements for exhibiting emotional capital on stage as a burden, an imposition to the realities of their life experiences.

25Another example of how we have naturalized emotions that reproduce structural inequality are the hidden gendered demands on women to perform self-deprecating humor. This is its own affective performance of humility that, according to Gadsby in Nanette, doubles as “humiliation.” Gadsby critiques the gendered imperative to self-deprecate and discusses the ways that this rhetorical comedic strategy takes a psychological toll on them, i.e., the repetition of self-denigration leads to beliefs that they are not just inferior but naturally inferior. People argue that men also use self-deprecation, but for men it is a choice and for women, an obligation. We are so accustomed to seeing women self-deprecate and men boast about themselves that even I as a critical cultural consumer find myself judging women who display unfettered self-assurance. While watching Douglas, I found myself periodically wondering if audience members might appraise Gadsby as arrogant because we are not used to female-identifying folks calling attention to their talents and expertise. We are even less accustomed to displays of genderqueer pride in front of a mainly cis-gendered audience. It is the foreignness, the unfamiliarity of such affective expressions that provokes dissonance.

27This simultaneously functioned to diminish the critiques Gadsby aims at stand-up comedy’s form and conventions. If they don’t perform comedy then we don’t have to take their critiques seriously. In response to such accusations, Gadsby tweeted: “I’ll settle this. My show is not stand-up comedy because I got jack of an art form designed by men for men. Female artists often defy genre” (qtd. in Chen). In their memoir, they describe the show as “‘stand-up catharsis,’ an experiment in the transmutation of trauma” (22). Despite sustained authorial rebuke and public backlash against those denying that Nanette counted as stand-up, this discourse of deniers continued long after. I was a guest on The Specials in January 2022 (nearly four years later)—a podcast co-hosted by Vulture comedy writer Jesse David Fox and Kathryn VanArendonk that takes deeper looks at groundbreaking comedy specials. The episode focused on Nanette, and at the end of the podcast this question was posed: “Is Nanette really comedy or something else?” The assertion of the pernicious discourse undermining Gadsby’s work as comedy and the palpable absence of any counternarrative reveals how easy it is to default to sexist and gendered critiques of minoritized comedians.

28Examinations of audience reception demonstrates that we have varying expectations of emotional capital based on race and gender. For example, In June 2020 Dave Chappelle filmed and posted to YouTube a performance titled 8:46. This half-hour performance was a direct response to the spate of murders perpetrated by police officers upon Black people in the spring of 2020: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. The title is both the amount of time a police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck before he died and the time-of-day Chappelle was born. This special did not have jokes included, something Chappelle openly admits on stage, rationalizing the omission of humor in this way: “I don’t mean to get heavy but we got to say something” (6:27-6:31). Despite him expressing outrage and refusing to tell standard jokes, it was not dismissed by the public as being “non-comedy” or a TedTalk; instead, it was lauded as a monologic act of social justice revealing “the very essence behind his usual brand of comedy” (Rengifo).

29These two performances do remarkably similar things when it comes to affective choices—both respond to the violence enacted on their bodies and people looking like them, and both link that violence to a longer, sordid history of violence. Yet audiences responded in strikingly different ways. This is not to discredit the importance of what Chappelle was saying here, merely to point out that both Gadsby and Chappelle compel their audience to bear witness to social injustices but have remarkably different experiences when it comes to audience reception. These racialized and gendered protocols of emotional capital require that Gadsby deny or repress emotions (such as rage/anger) for the sake of the occupational environment (in this case stand-up comedy), and that they substitute more acceptable emotions for a woman like humility that comes in the form of embracing self-deprecating humor. Audiences rewarded Chappelle for fulfilling affective expectations of a Black man. He parlayed his (rightful) anger into emotional capital in the form of positive critical and popular reviews, a maneuver unavailable to Gadsby.

5. Conclusion

30One can analyze EC in any occupational environment; indeed, much may be revealed in such inquiries. Affect studies may be applied to comedy to broaden our understanding of the form and emotional capital provides a viable framework for feminist comedy studies to evaluate what is affectively acceptable in stand-up comedy at any moment in time. This exploration began with questions about affective conventions in stand-up comedy on stage and off and which positionalities are best poised to fulfill those expectations. Current affective conventions reflect that the dominant modes or the most prized of emotion-based knowledges, management skills, and emotional self-reflexivity have been established and maintained by white, cis-gendered, straight men. Hannah Gadsby’s comedy demonstrates that all aspects of emotional capital necessary for success in the profession are not neutral but fundamentally sexist (and often unsafe for women), racist (and especially unsafe for BIPOC women), heteronormative (and especially unsafe for trans folks of color), ableist, and classist. While this analysis foregrounds gender and race (and nominally, sexuality and ability), future explorations may consider how socio-economic status factors into the accrual and deployment of emotional capital in the stand-up industry.

31Zembylas makes the point that if you can see the power relations inherent in affective economies, you can also see how we might “contest or seek to re-channel it” (457). In other words, this “provides a powerful analysis of the possibilities for theorizing change” (458). In their memoir, Gadsby reflects on the content of Nanette and apologizes for the ways in which silences and omissions reinforced privileges accorded dominant identities in the show: “I regret not being more explicit about the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality (which is to say, my privilege), and for not being more consistent and careful about using language inclusive of non-binary and trans folk” (20). They unmask these affective imperatives as flawed because they are fundamentally gendered, raced, classed, and abled and in their comedy, memoir, and professional encounters offers a new way forward that refuses those masculinist, white Eurocentric emotion mandates. Instead, Gadsby offers a new affective mode for comedy that rejects uniting people with anger (common male tactic) or with laughter (ubiquitous comedic tactic). In their memoir they write that they sought “to simulate a feeling in the room that was akin to trauma” in order to “create an experience of communal empathy in a room full of strangers” (22). This affective overture invites us to connect across social, cultural, and national differences in the final minutes of Nanette.

Laughter is not our medicine. Stories hold our cure…. I don’t want to unite you with laughter or anger. I just needed my story heard. My story felt and understood by individuals with minds of their own. Because like it or not, your story is my story and my story is your story. I just don’t have the strength to take care of my story anymore. I don’t want my story defined by anger. All I can ask is just please help me take care of my story. (1:06:52-1:07:39)

32Hannah Gadsby’s comedy troubles the traditional construction of emotional capital necessary for an effective affective comedy performance and models a way forward that refuses those masculinist, white, Eurocentric emotional mandates on stage and off.