Many of us know and love comedian Joanna Hausmann’s videos, ranging from topics like Latin American accents, to stereotypes, to politics. We take a look at the journey that got this unapologetic Venezuelan-American-Jewish-Latina (Jew-tina, as she calls herself) to where she is today, and how she’s been building bridges between cultures, languages and identities in the process.
Joanna Hausmann was born in England but moved around a lot during her childhood, from Caracas, to Washington DC, to Boston, and now lives in New York City. She comes from a family of immigrants—her father’s grandparents were Holocaust survivors and her mother’s side of the family were Cuban exiles from Fidel Castro’s regime. Her parents met in Venezuela, and Joanna considers herself a second-generation Venezuelan. “I feel very very proud to be Venezuelan. Particularly because the Venezuela that I was taught of was the Venezuela of inclusion, the Venezuela that opened its doors to immigrants,” she said in an interview.
Having grown up at the intersection of multiple identities, Joanna realized the importance of being one’s authentic self. “I grew up explaining who I was,” she explained, “as a white Latina with a Jewish last name. That does not make sense in the conceptualization of what a Latina should be.” Once she figured out who she was, Joanna quickly became the class clown. “Making people laugh was the one thing that stayed with me no matter where I went,” she said. And she has been bringing people together through laughter since.
Joanna attended Tufts University, where she majored in History and English and began to hone into creative writing and performing. But it wasn’t until after college that she became exposed to true comedy. She attended an intensive program in Chicago, where she learned improv, sketching, stand-up writing, and directing. There, she discovered the diversity of comedy. “I was once again different from the other students in the program, but I didn’t feel like an outsider anymore,” she said.
She eventually gathered the courage to do stand-up comedy, and after her first-time performance in Gotham Comedy Club was discovered by Univision’s bilingual digital platform Flama. She was invited to join the team, where she eventually began to create her famous in-house videos. The first “Joanna Rants” video got a million views within a week. Today, her content has garnered over 20 million views.
She creates her videos to help people feel identified with. “I want them to see themselves in what I’m saying – that makes me feel connected with the world. I like the feeling of people not being alone in their identity,” she explained. Thanks to the Internet, conversing with people from completely different cultures has allowed us to find things we all have in common, she said. “What I’m really attempting to do, subconsciously, is to humanize ‘the other’ and make people realize that we’re pretty much all the same. Just because I’m Jewish, Venezuelan and white doesn’t mean I don’t have the same perspective on life and the world as all the people who watch my stuff,” she added.
And she has been successful in doing so. Her audience ranges from all types of backgrounds, including non-Hispanics. “Sometimes I’ll get people saying to me, ‘you’re the first Latina I could understand’,” she said. “I want to be a portal to understanding that ethnicity and nationality don’t really mean anything. If my comedy can do something to make people more understanding of each other at a human level, then I’ll feel like I’m doing at least one thing right,” she added.
Photo: Joanna Hausmann/Facebook