Hannah Gadsby says no, no to more ‘Nanette’
Before the release of “Nanette,” Hannah Gadsby’s quirky personality, self-effacing humor and jokes about art history, horticulture and lesbianism weren’t known to many people outside her home country of Australia. Then, in the summer of 2018, everything changed.
Gadsby’s one-hour special was released on Netflix and, seemingly overnight, the then-unknown comic became the most talked-about stand-up comedian in the world.
That was not the plan. “Nanette” was written, in fact, as anti-comedy. It was a raw and unvarnished refusal to deliver laughs, which also served as a piece of confession: Gadsby was going to quit comedy.
“I was really dead inside,” Gadsby says over the phone, explaining
that mining humor from her personal life was taking a devastating toll. She’s calling from her home in Melbourne, where she spends most of her time “puttering around and having think-thoughts.”
In other words, she’s preparing for her upcoming comedy tour. Because “Nanette” was such a breakout success, Gadsby was quickly signed for an international jaunt, titled “Douglas,” which stops by Houston’s Jones Hall on June 2 (tickets sold through Society for the Performing Arts).
“I was leaving my own trauma onstage,” she continues. “That’s a dangerous thing to do. It was harder than you could imagine, a hell of an exhausting chore.”
And so Gadsby, rather than bending to the rules of comedy, sought to break them. Filmed at the Sydney Opera House to a rapturous but unprepared crowd, “Nanette” began with typical self-deprecating humor about the struggles of life as a gay woman living in Australia.
But then “Nanette” took a big turn, one that anyone familiar with the rules of comedy knows is a cardinal sin. Gadsby told the audience something very true, very traumatic and not at all funny. No, instead of a punchline, there was a gut punch. Gadsby delivered a wrenching criticism of comedy, and the way it commodifies the pain of women and gay people for the entertainment of the masses. She showed a part of herself that comedy would never have let her reveal.
“I thought I’d owed it to my audience to not phone it in, not develop any tricks that would protect me, because ‘Nanette’ was breaking the contract with the audience,” Gadsby says. “I had a responsibility to stay in the room.”
“Nanette” also contained a scathing indictment of patriarchal standards of art, focusing on topics central to the #MeToo movement. In the special, Gadsby tells of a story in which a man mistakes her for a man and harasses her. She offers a clever punchline, one that pokes fun at both the man’s ignorance and the awkward situation created by Gadsby’s androgynous appearance.
It’s not until late in the show when Gadsby tells us the punchline wasn’t the end of the story. The encounter has a harrowing end, one, in fact, that makes us question why we laughed in the first place.
“I did a ‘reverse call back,’ ” the comic explains. “What a call back is, a reference to your first joke — that’s a way of making a room full of people feel like they’re all in on a joke. There’s a lovely connection you can manufacture in a comedy room by doing callbacks. ‘I’ve forgotten about that one, you’ve reminded me of that one, that’s funny.’ ”
“The second, third time you do a callback, it gets funnier, but the jokes don’t have to be funnier,” she says. “I like to do a reverse callback, which is to say, ‘Oh, remember that thing I was talking about? You’re not going to laugh about it anymore.’ That was a very risky move.”
The risk paid off. Here are some headlines that followed the release on Netflix. Wired: “Seriously, We Need to Talk About Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Nanette.’ ” New York Times: “‘Nanette’ Is the Most Discussed Comedy Special in Ages.” Washington Post: “Why Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix special ‘Nanette’ is so remarkable.” The Atlantic: “Nanette Is a Radical, Transformative Work of Comedy.”
“I expected ‘Nanette’ to reduce my audience,” she says with a deadpan tone. “It backfired completely.”
Gadsby isn’t choosing to follow “Nanette” with a sequel. To do that would be too harrowing. Yet the overwhelming reception to “Nanette” has re-energized her passion for comedy, and so she’s returning to her more charming roots with “Douglas,” in which she talks about pets, plants and art history — and less raw trauma.
“I can’t follow a show like ‘Nanette’ with another show like ‘Nanette,’ ” Gadsby says. “That would be disingenuous. It’s not healthy for me either. There are still risks, but ‘Douglas’ is a lot more fun.”