SERIES
Sometimes a bit of laughter can be deep therapy
Trigger warning: if you think this is just going to be another easylaugh Netflix special highlighting the work of some comedian you’ve never really heard of but are glad you’ve decided to watch, you’re about to be disappointed and profoundly confronted with some uncomfortable truths. Tasmania-born lesbian comedian Hannah Gadsby begins her performance in the familiar, selfdeprecating, slightly uneasy manner that you might expect from a performer who knows that she has to get the audience to overcome some of their prejudices in order to get them on her side.
Giving them the knowing wink that plays with their own insecurities and hers
. . . before she completely flips the switch and turns her show into something much more than just a joke-telling session. She does this in a way that few comedians since Lenny Bruce and maybe Richard Pryor have managed to do, and perhaps more movingly and shockingly than anyone in the history of comedy.
The awkward moments begin with a few angry digs at the patriarchy that reach beyond the current #MeToo moment to the misogyny of Pablo Picasso and the insensitivity of considerations of Vincent van Gogh merely through the lens of mental illness (Gadsby is a former failed art history major who suffers from depression). This is seemingly softened by her half-hearted claim that she’s decided to quit comedy.
Before you know it, the awkward laughter is replaced by horribly shocked silence as you find yourself in a dark, deeply uncomfortable but undeniably real place that requires a complete re-evaluation of attitudes to both Gadsby and the realities of life in the LGBTQIA+ community.
Gadsby’s project is not just to give a much-needed kick up the backside to the patriarchy, but one that seeks to make her audience realise that for people like her, whose difference is an ever-present, unfairly shame-inducing and potentially lethal aspect of their every waking moment, there’s nothing to laugh about, no matter how much they may try to satisfy the demands of the storytelling conventions of stand-up.
It’s a tribute to Gadsby’s complete mastery of her craft that she manages to take her audience on a journey that moves from a series of uncomfortable laughs to a moment in which they may feel that they’ve been transported into the middle of a deeply uncomfortable therapy session. Something they didn’t pay the ticket price to be part of, but one which they needed to see with their own eyes to truly understand their complicity and responsibility.
At the end of its brief hour, if you don’t, like the audience in the theatre, after a brief WTF pause, get to your feet and cheer the sheer audacity, bravery and brilliance of Gadsby’s revelatory demonstration of the power of her medium to do more than simply make you chuckle — then, quite frankly, you’re not human. Like the Scarecrow and the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, you’re missing a brain and a heart.
Gadsby may quit stand-up comedy but you’ll never be able to forget her parting shot and the terrible condemnation it delivers to our too-long-accepted modes of dealing with those who we dismiss on the basis of difference. LS
Hannah Gadsby: Nanette is on Netflix
BEFORE YOU KNOW IT, THE AWKWARD LAUGHTER IS REPLACED BY HORRIBLY SHOCKED SILENCE