Her Pain Is Not Funny Anymore
LOS ANGELES — Perhaps you’ve heard: Hannah Gadsby is angry, and she is amazing.
Ms. Gadsby, an Australian comedian, is the creator of “Nanette,” a stage show turned Netflix special that is lacerating in its fury about how women, queer people and those who look “other” get treated. She is unflinching about the abuse they have endured, and the cultural norms that enabled it. She reveals her own gender and sexual trauma, and doesn’t invite people to laugh at it.
“Nanette” is the most- talkedabout comedy act in years. And in its success Ms. Gadsby, 40, has perhaps pointed the art form of stand-up in a new direction. “I have built a career out of self- deprecating humor, and I don’t want to do that anymore,” she says in the special. “Because do you understand what self- deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation.”
The response to “Nanette” is “beyond my comprehension,” Ms. Gadsby said one recent morning in Los Angeles. She was tired, not just from the trip from Australia, but also from touring this act, which in 2017 won major prizes at both the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe. “Over 250 times I did that show, and it took a toll,” she said. “I need to spend the next year mostly napping.”
The comedian Tig Notaro, who chronicled her cancer in a special, said she was “utterly floored” by Ms. Gadsby’s hourlong show. “‘Nanette’ should be required viewing if you’re a human being,” she wrote in an email. Ms. Gadsby, she added, was disrupting comedy. “She cleared the table for necessary regrowth,” Ms. Notaro said.
“Nanette” was prompted by Australia’s debate on same- sex marriage, and came after Ms. Gadsby received a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder and ADHD. Those gave her clarity about her life — and how things might have been different if the world were more accepting. She said: “I was a hot mess. I had so much just suddenly crystallize in my head, and I just needed to get it out.”
Growing up in small-town Tasmania, Ms. Gadsby was a state champion golfer. She started playing at the country club where her mother worked, and where women then were not permitted to be full-fledged members. When her brother won a tournament, he was awarded golf equipment. “I would win casserole dishes and vases,” she said. “I was basically winning stuff for my dowry.”
Those experiences shaped her worldview, especially how her feisty mother was denigrated at work. Confrontation seemed exhausting. Instead, “I learned how to disappear,” Ms. Gadsby said. “I was invisible.”
Ms. Gadsby studied art history at Australian National University in Canberra. She worked at a bookshop and at an outdoor cinema, then became an itinerant farmhand. In her late 20s, on a whim, she entered a competition sponsored by the Melbourne Comedy Festival. She knew she was funny. “It’s how I participated in life without participating,” she said. She made it to the state finals.
Ms. Gadsby’s family knew some of what she had been through, but when they came to see “Nanette” early on, she modified it because, she said, it was “unfair to subject them to that kind of sucker punch in a roomful of strangers.”
The show is built around her assault at a bus stop, which she tells in detail — first for laughs, and then with rage. She also mentions other serious, predatory violations in her childhood and young adulthood, without much detail; she did not feel ready, she said, “because I knew those people.”
Her mother was at the Sydney Op- era House when the show was taped for Netflix, so she couldn’t change the material. She nearly broke down.
“I think that the magic trick of the show is that it is funny, and then it turns funny inside out,” said Mike Birbiglia, the comedian and filmmaker.
Comedians from Kumail Nanjiani to Kathy Griffin have tweeted awe at what Ms. Gadsby accomplished. Mr. Birbiglia said it was part of a movement in comedy to reach higher. “It just makes you think, let’s go one step deeper,” he said.
Ms. Gadsby is not eager to get back onstage, but her low self- esteem has been boosted by the glow of “Nanette.” That’s not to say she thinks everyone who has suffered should perform their trauma.
“Part of what undoes shame is to be heard, to be seen,” she said. “I did that on a grand scale. I don’t want people to look at me and go, see, queer people, this is how it’s done. It’s like, no, this is how it shouldn’t have to be done.”