Gabriella Blatt, Ezra Styles '21
Reclaiming Comedy
By Lexa Pulido Rodriguez
During one of my First-Year at Yale (FSY) summer program activities, I had the opportunity to meet FSY counselor Gabriella Blatt, a senior majoring in Ethnicity, Race, Migration with a focus in Race and Indigeneity in Modern Media. In high school, I was interested in conducting research in college, but I was afraid there would not be many opportunities in the humanities. When Gabriella first mentioned that she loved her research, I knew I had to learn more about it, so I decided to interview her.
Gabriella has been extremely involved with the Native American Cultural Center all four years. For example, during her sophomore and junior years, she was the president of the Association of Native Americans at Yale (ANNAY), the political advocacy group for Indigenous peoples on campus. Gabriella is one of 10 students from her class to receive the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, a program that offers financial, informational, and instrumental support to minority students committed to addressing racial disparities in the pursuit of PhDs and other careers in academia. Her research project focuses on Indigenous comedy and media by emphasizing Native American joy, a theme whose representation in the media is lacking.
Surprisingly, instead of humanities research, Gabriella conducted scientific research in high school. She worked at a local college laboratory researching biofuels and wanted to pursue environmental engineering, but as she sat through her STEM classes at Yale, she noticed that she was not engaged with the material as much as she thought she would be. Therefore, she began to branch out and take advantage of all the courses Yale offers. She started taking classes in the English and the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration departments, where she found herself being challenged in ways she had never been before. In the fall semester of her sophomore year, she stumbled across a class titled “Race and Comedy” taught by Professor Albert Laguna, who later became her mentor. Gabriella chose to take this course because she had always been interested in comedy. In high school, she had loved watching stand-up comedy, and in college, she started watching improv shows on campus. However, it was not until she took this class that Gabriella began to notice that Native comedy material was extremely limited, in contrast to the plethora of material featuring Black and Latinx comedies.
As a result, Gabriella began to reflect on her own experiences as a Native American woman living on a reservation. She had grown up surrounded by the comedy in her family members’ and her entire tribe’s histories. Regardless, there was a lack of Indigenous representation on national media, and she also noticed that most Native American research only focused on pain rather than joy.
After noticing that there were hundreds of Indigenous memes and meme pages throughout Facebook and Instagram, she decided to research how Native people use social media to create names for other Native people. What started as a final paper on Indigenous meme pages became a funded research project.
“Despite not being allowed to enter mainstream media, we're still creating these spaces in the media for ourselves,” Gabriella expressed.
Gabriella applied to the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship during the spring of her sophomore year. The fellowship provides her with monthly and summer stipends that are supposed to replace the amount she would make working a student job or internship. This year, the program allowed recipients to also obtain half a credit for their research by meeting every week to talk about research techniques and fellowship opportunities. The fellowship was eye-opening for her because it exposed her to what pursuing her PhD would look like, and she would have never imagined becoming a professor without this program.
When I asked Gabriella for advice that she would give underclassmen, she responded, “There is room for everything in academia. There is always going to be an area for you to explore, so don’t ever worry about your project being too specific, just go for it!”