If you haven't yet seen "Nanette," Australian comic and performer Hannah Gadsby's stunning Netflix special and recent live show, it's going to be hard to talk to you about it. Not because there's nothing to say — the rapturous outpouring of critical and audience responses make clear exactly how brilliant a catalyst for superlatives it is. It's just that the less you know going in, the more effectively Gadsby's master work will hit you. It's the most sharply of-the-moment performance of the year, and the most groundbreaking, career-defining standup special since Chris Rock's "Bring the Pain" more than two decades ago. So make sure you've seen it before we go on here.
If you — like her legion of new fans — weren't familiar with Gadsby before her special dropped on June 19, her breakthrough will feel like a stealth subversion. "Nanette" at first appears to be another in Netflix's long and successful recent line of standup hits — an hour of mirth from the platform that helped propel John Mulaney and Ali Wong's careers to new heights, and where Louis C.K. comedy specials still live.
The show begins with a scene of Gadsby petting her dogs and donning her glasses, and is sprinkled throughout with bits about art history and the satisfaction of a teacup greeting its saucer. Gadsby describes watching the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras as a young woman coming to terms with her sexuality, and wondering, "Where do the quiet gays go?" And then you realize that this unassuming woman, this person who shrugs off being mistaken for a "bloke" — including by a stranger who was ready to beat her for talking to his girlfriend — is teeing up.
"I think I have to quit comedy," she says, an unusual statement for a person to make while doing standup at the Sydney Opera House, unusual for a person still on tour with this very show. ("Nanette" just ended a run in New York City, and is part of this month's Montreal Just for Laughs Festival.) And then, with quiet, steely rage, she meticulously begins to rearrange her own work. "I built a career on self deprecating humor," she explains. "and I don't want to do that any more. Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from someone who already exists in the margins?” she says. “It’s not humility. It’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission to speak, and I simply will not do that anymore, not to myself, or anybody who identifies with me."
The jester is done making you feel comfortable.
And then she proceeds to talk, often quite comically, for another 50 minutes. She picks apart the construction of her joke telling, the ways she creates tension and lands her punchlines. She's like Penn and Teller, revealing her magic while creating new magic at the same time.
Gadsby smiles as she tells straight white men that she understands that "It is a difficult and confusing time for you right now," right before lobbing back some of the more explicit "advice" she's been offered in her own life. She revisits her stories of just moments earlier about coming out to her mother and about being mistaken for a man, this time without the embellishment and editing of her previous versions. The self-described quiet woman speaks with escalating fury at the violence, the homophobia, the misogyny and the marginalization she's experienced. Her voice begins to rise and her placating demeanor begins to fall away. She rages at the legacy of shame, admitting how difficult it is to shake off. She channels her own pain and that of her audience. She yells. She owns her anger, fully, but refuses to spread it. She burns her previous material to the ground, then goes full circle until she's back drinking tea with her dogs, ever the homebody.
"Nanette" could not have dropped into the conversation at a more relevant moment — coming in the throes not just of the #MeToo movement but a divisive debate over the nature of "civility" and its limits. But it began its public life a year ago at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It's evolved since; the Harvey Weinstein references are no doubt new. Yet it feels as if the world has been rushing up to meet Gadsby where she stands, instead of her conforming herself to the audience. She's the right voice, speaking at the right moment. If "Nanette" has a close recent equivalent, it's Amy Schumer's "The Leather Special" from last year, in which Schumer delivered her trademark sexual misadventure humor with an eviscerating turn toward the 2015 shooting deaths of two women at a showing of her movie "Trainwreck." She said their names. She explained how their murderer, a domestic abuser, obtained his weapon. And then she told more jokes.
Gadsby's special has been rightly singled out for its disgust at the protections abusers have been given for the sake of their art, and it is a compelling element. Gadsby punctures the myth of the great man and his sacred reputation, pondering the treasures we will now never have from those clobbered in their wake. "The moral is we don't give a shit about women or children," she says. And exploring the "easy punchline" of Monica Lewinsky 20 years ago, she connects the dots to the consequences of making a woman the butt of the joke instead of the man who abused his power. (Lewinsky, gloriously, recently saw the show live and called it "one of the most profound + thought provoking experiences of my life.")
Yet hand in hand with Gadsby's revocation of the "Let's separate the art from the artist" card is her exploration of how we cast ourselves in our stories. It means something different for a comic with the privileges of a Louis C.K., for instance, to put himself down in his humor than it does for a lesbian from a small town in Tasmania, a place that legalized homosexuality in the late nineties. That's why C.K. and his ilk should feel free to go away forever, now that Gadsby has so decisively bested him on his turf. This is one of the thrills of "Nanette" — it fits so beautifully in the growing body of evidence that mediocre men and their enablers are quite expendable. There is a whole culture to be remade, one in which the people who have been left out of the story can now get to create it. What if you just could just do the work and do it well without being a dick about it? Uh-oh guys, you can.
Politics and personal trauma have long been an intrinsic element of comedy. But along with Gadsby's intimate candor and her case for dismantling the patriarchal power structure (though I am here for it), there's also the crucial issue she raises right from the outset — what does it mean to be revolutionary when you're also someone who goes to bed early? Why is being shy and quiet and yes, vulnerable and sensitive, associated with being weak? Gadsby spends much her time debunking the notion that her demeanor is a signal she's a doormat. "When someone tells me to stop being so sensitive," she deadpans, "I feel a little bit like a nose being lectured by a fart."
In the two weeks since "Nanette" dropped, the women in my life have been texting me about when they got to the point they started crying. They quote Gadsby's furious, defiant observation that "There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself." Gadsby, meanwhile, has become a full-blown star. It's because the noses of the world are pretty goddamn fed up with the nonsense the farts keep peddling. They're tired of farts saying that anyone who speaks up against them is a "snowflake," but whining if they're shunned or challenged. They're done making themselves the butt of jokes the farts can laugh at, so the farts won't hurt them. Because they know you can be gentle and furious, and that rage without humanity is just so much bilious hot wind. In her special, Gadsby says that "Artists don't invent the zeitgeist; they respond to it." Welcome, then to the zeitgeist. Your artist is Hannah Gadsby.
Shares