Summer House’s Hannah Berner Details Botox Injections That Froze Her Smile

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.