Abig-bang retirement
An ‘abusive relationship’ with comedy is making her quit stand-up, entertainer Hannah Gadsby says in a radical new show, writes
For many years now, Hannah Gadsby, 40, has been a well-loved fixture on the Australian comedy scene. Those who follow sitcoms will remember her from Josh Thomas’ underrated show Please Like Me, but few knew of her outside her country. Not anymore.
Since it aired on Netflix a few weeks ago, Gadsby’s stand-up set Nanette has become the most talked-about piece in recent years. It is nothing like any comedy show before. It may, in fact, set a precedent for others.
With social media buzzing about it, one would expect it to be the funniest show of our times; but it’s actually one of the most discomfiting mirrors audiences may have looked into. Wearing her horn-rimmed glasses, Gadsby took on one issue after another, raging through it all in her signature sardonic, almost-caustic style.
The first half of the set mostly follows a regular routine. There are a couple of good laughs, but the show is also heartbreaking. It’s also very significant for many reasons.
Gadsby grew up in Smithton, a small town in Tasmania known for potatoes and a “frighteningly small gene pool”. More significantly, the community was homophobic. Homosexuality was a crime in Tasmania till 1997, and Gadsby likes women. But even as the debate about homosexuality raged on, lesbians were never really part of the equation.
“For a long time I knew more facts about unicorns than I did about lesbians,” says Gadsby. The pervasive stereotypes around “her people” (the queer community) didn’t help her come to terms with her sexuality either.
The gay pride parades she saw on television never appealed to her quiet nature: her favourite sound, she says, is the delicate “plink” of a porcelain cup meeting its place in a saucer. “It’s very, very difficult to flaunt that lifestyle in a parade!”
Addressing queer stereotypes, she recollects the time a self-appointed spokesperson of the minority community told her after a set that there “wasn’t enough lesbian content in the show”. “I was on the stage the whole time,” says Gadsby. She doesn’t really identify as a sexual minority, she says. Instead, she identifies as “tired”.
She’s tired of how queer people are supposed to behave a certain way, of how men treat women, of how mental illness is romanticised, and of how comedy thrives on a culture of selfdeprecation.
In Nanette, she breaks away from this culture. “Do you understand what selfdeprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? 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 this anymore.”
Gadsby takes the time to reflect on the “feedback” she gets. One time after a show in which she had spoken about taking anti-depressants, a man told her as an artiste, she needed to suffer. If van Gogh had taken medication, he said to her, we wouldn’t have the sunflowers.
Gadsby’s art history degree told her otherwise: that Vincent van Gogh indeed took medication, including for epilepsy, which reportedly made the colour yellow appear more vivid to him.
Van Gogh also painted lots of doctors, she told the man, particularly portraits of his psychiatrists. The reason he drew sunflowers despite all his troubles is because he had a brother who loved him, not because he suffered.
She also uses her stage time to delve into the #MeToo movement and talks about how it’s the women who comedians often gun for, like in the scandal with Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. She equates it with the time Pablo Picasso, then in his 40s, got away with having an affair with a teenager because he claimed she was in her prime. “A 17-year-old girl is just never ever in her prime. Ever. I am in my prime. Would you test your strength out on me?” she asks.
The hour-long Nannette is a scorching piece of evidence that Gadsby really is in her prime. And going by the reactions she’s evoked from fans and critics, they agree. What was to be her swan song in stand-up has perhaps been the most significant moment in the history of comedy.
She’s tired of how queer people are supposed to behave a certain way, of how men treat women, of how mental illness is romanticised, and of how comedy thrives on a culture of self-deprecation