CANCER JOKES & THE HERMIT CRAB ESSAY
The past two years have been anything but funny. And yet, to remake my mind during the pandemic, as virus variants and sociopolitical atrocities floated through my news feed, I turned to female stand-up comedians. It all started with Tig Notaro’s 2012 comedy album, Live. Recorded shortly after Notaro’s breast cancer diagnosis, the album deals with content that doesn’t at first appear to be very funny; in addition to the cancer diagnosis, Notaro shares she’s just lost her mother, and that the hospital accidentally sent her dead mom a satisfaction survey. Then she uses the survey’s form to structure the segment. At the time, I was preparing to teach a creative nonfiction class on the hermit crab form. As I toggled between the album and Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola’s definition of the hermit crab essay as one that “appropriates existing forms as an outer covering,” I started seeing Notaro’s set as a hermit crab essay—a comedy set in the form of a hospital satisfaction survey, in the form of tragedy, in the form of creative nonfiction. Both the hermit crab and stand-up comedy forms hinge on their ability to surprise. They recast something you thought you knew in a whole new framework that highlights both its familiarity and its strangeness.
Stand-up comedy isn’t usually included under the creative nonfiction umbrella, perhaps because of its performative element, or maybe because comedy still gets labeled as a “low” art and creative nonfiction as a “high” one. But it definitely should be. The current work of women stand-up comics reflects and builds on what women creative nonfiction writers are doing in terms of telling important stories—ranging from childbirth to trauma—in ways that expand what’s possible in storytelling. Stand-up comedians and creative nonfiction writers may work in different arenas, but the impulse at interview, Hannah Gadsby—another comic whose work has been labelled “anti-comedy”—says of stand-up, “There does have to be a revolution of form in order to accommodate different voices,” and a revolution there has been.
