Hannah Gadsby bows out with a departure from traditional comedy
Edinburgh Festival Hannah Gadsby: Nanette Assembly George Square Studios
After 10 years as a stand-up comedian, Hannah Gadsby is leaving the business. She feels that the art-form is too restrictive, the obligation to tell jokes obscuring the story that she really wants – really needs – to tell. “There’s only so long I can pretend not to be serious,” said the 39-year-old Australian in a recent interview.
Nanette (named after a cranky old barista she once met) is a devastating, furious farewell, in which Gadsby, at last, reveals the full extent of the pain she endured growing up gay in Tasmania, which didn’t legalise homosexuality until 1997.
That pain hasn’t gone away. Gadsby’s sexuality has been at the heart of her previous shows but this time, she refuses to hide her suffering behind the usual self-deprecating routines.
As Gadsby explains, comedy is all about tension and release; set up and punchline. A good joke immediately diffuses an atmosphere. It is why she has spent her life, even before she got into stand-up, making jokes about homophobia. Well, not any more; there is no release here. “I have a responsibility to make you laugh,” she says at one point. “But I’m not in the mood.”
To prove this, Gadsby re-tells a story that she used in her early shows about the time in her teens when a man confused her for a bloke and accused her of flirting with his girlfriend. Only in Nanette, she finally adds in the crucial bit about him putting his boot into her face time and time again, even after he realised his mistake, calling her a “female poofter”. Now you realise how Gadsby must have felt as people laughed at the edited version of this horrific story, night after night.
It’s not quite true to say that there are no laughs in this show, which won the main award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival earlier this year and is tipped to do the same in Edinburgh. When it is funny, it is very funny indeed. Gadsby, who is so assured on stage, dismisses the Gay Pride flag as a “bit busy” and takes great delight in picking apart the sexism that courses through art history. She damns Picasso for having a relationship with a 17-year-old girl but, as she points out, that’s OK because he invented Cubism.
But to dwell too long on the laughs would do a disservice to Gadsby. Over the course of this unflinching hour, she beats her chest in anger and fights back the tears, as she eloquently defends the rights of the gay community: the right not to live in shame; the right not to be abused; and the right to bring up children.
“Comedy leaves you in a terminal state of adolescence,” says Gadsby. Maybe so; but Nanette feels very grown up. As Gadsby leaves the stage, having refused once and for all to break the tension, you are left in stunned silence. She’s right about the limitations of comedy: no joke could have had the same effect.