Summer House alum Hannah Berner discussed how losing the ability to fully smile—after receiving masseter botox injections to help relieve chronic jaw pain—has impacted her comedy career.
Hannah Berner has found a way to smile through the pain—well, at least on the inside.
After the comedian said she had a bad reaction to botox injections—which she receives to treat temporomandibular joint disorder (commonly referred to as TMJ)—she has found the bright side of the accident that made "smiling felt like weightlifting."
"I’m so happy that it was making people laugh because I was disturbed," Berner told the New York Times in an interview published Aug. 16. “I was upset. I had jobs on the line."
It was the Summer House alum’s third time getting botox applied to the masseter muscles (which connect the cheeks to the jaw), as she explained on her Giggly Squad podcast in June, because "I clench my teeth really bad and I wake up with headaches sometimes," which is a common cause for the pain, per the Mayo Clinic.
Though the medical incident that Berner has dubbed the "masseter massacre" was far from ideal, the 35-year-old has managed to find a silver lining of not being able to fully smile as much as she normally does.
"I do smile a lot—and not that it’s bad," Berner told the outlet looking back at the time since the incident, "but I think there’s situations where I learned you actually don’t have to smile and you could just sit in a moment."
As such, even though Berner said the mishap threw a curveball in her summer plans, it has also inspired her to work. "The fact that the whole community came together to be like 'This is the funniest thing' made me remember why I do comedy," she explained, "which is to be vulnerable about what you’re going through and make other people feel less bad about the stuff they’re going through."
Still, the stand-up comedian admitted that she had a bad feeling at the clinic before her current grimace became a meme among her fans.
"I remember something in my soul was like, 'Get out of here,'" Berner recalled on the June 26 podcast episode. "But 34 years old, the people pleaser in me, she's so strong."
She also confessed she hadn't "looked up anything" because she wasn't aware of the potential side effects to her face.
"I did not know there were risks to this procedure. I've never heard of a risk. I didn't know this could happen," Berner said. "I remember thinking 'What could go wrong?'"
Keep reading to learn what celebs have shared about cosmetic procedures.
The Love Is Blind season three alum shared that she had gotten a boob job amid her divorce from husband Brennon Lemieux.
"I'm officially day five post-surgery and I feel pretty much back to normal for the most part," she shared in her January 2026 TikTok video. "I did a lift and an implant. Recovery hasn't been as tough as I thought that it would be. This is a surgery that I have been wanting to do for quite some time now, really, since I stopped breastfeeding my daughter. My girls just never set the same as they did before."
