It was only a matter of time before a stand-up comedian channelled the righteous rage of the current feminist moment. Dave Chappelle released a special about #MeToo, but he didn’t respond to events so much as shoehorn them into his usual preoccupations. Other comics weighed in, but none have produced a show with as much unsettling urgency as Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, a riveting New York debut at SoHo Playhouse that announces a major new voice. Gadsby calls out Louis C.K., Harvey Weinstein and Bill Clinton, not to mention Pablo Picasso, in an ingenious indictment of the sexism and sentimentality of our narratives about genius, but her real target is the culture that enables and excuses abuse. That doesn’t sound funny, I realise, but she is that, too. Still, the laughs of her show are a means to an end, which is, at its core, a ferocious attack on comedy itself. Gadsby, a 40-year-old Australian comic, is an unknown in the US, but the way she weaves intellectual arguments into taut jokes makes it clear she’s no novice. After more than a decade of stand-up, she developed a following in Europe and Australia with self-deprecating comedy about her family, her weight and coming out as a lesbian in a homophobic community. Nanette — which won awards last year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and has since been picked up by Netflix for a future release — begins in that quirky vein. Walking onstage, she is all stammers and fidgets and overly articulate neuroses, adjusting the microphone stand and repeatedly pushing her glasses up her nose, evoking no one so much as Woody Allen. She makes fun of Tasmania, where she grew up and where gay sex was not decriminalised until 1997, and even jokes about how lesbians don’t have a sense of humour. The title Nanette, she explains, refers to a barista who was going to be the subject of the show, but she couldn’t make it work. Failure is the theme of her early material. Her self-mocking nebbish is a familiar persona, but there comes a moment when she drops and deconstructs it, and that turning point makes you re-evaluate everything you saw before. “Do you know what self-deprecation means coming from somebody who exists on the margins?” she asks. “It is not humility; it is humiliation.” Then she goes on the attack, cheerfully smashing pieties like the one about comedy being the best medicine. “I reckon penicillin might give it a nudge,” she says. “Your baby is sick? Just give it a tickle.” Breaking down comedy with mathematical precision, she explains that good stories have three parts (beginning, middle and end) while jokes require two (set-up and punch line), which means that to end on a laugh, comics often need to cut off the most important and constructive element, where hindsight, perspective and catharsis exist. “A joke is a question, artificially inseminated with tension,” she says, before explaining the mechanics of her job. “I make you all tense and then I cure it with a laugh. And you say: ‘Thanks for that, I was feeling a bit tense.’”
Then in one of many tonal shifts, she raises her voice, irritated at the audience’s hypothetic gratitude: “But I made you tense!” Then she points to the audience and back at her and quips, darkly, “This is an abusive relationship.” This is a show where, more than once, the performer makes the crowd laugh and laugh and, suddenly, turn deadly silent. She also nimbly leaps from personal stories to big-picture analysis, including a damning digression about Picasso, whom she calls a misogynist, citing both his own statements and an affair with a 17-year-old. After drawing attention to the silliness of discussing art history in a stand-up show, she gets serious again, saying comics have been more likely to make dismissive jokes about Monica Lewinsky or “throwaway gags” about Weinstein. It’s on this subject that her jokes stop and her tone becomes grave, saying we care more about the reputations of artists like Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby than their accusers. Does that mean that Nanette is no longer comedy? I don’t think so. Comedy is much broader than Gadsby suggests. It can double down on prejudices or challenge them. Rape jokes have shamed victims, and one bit by Hannibal Buress helped kick off the backlash against Cosby. Despite Gadsby’s formulaic definitions of comedy, a whole tradition, which includes Andy Kaufman and Tig Notaro and various proponents of cringe comedy, experiments with the tension-release dynamic of the set-up and punch line. “People really only feel safe when men do the angry comedy,” Gadsby says. “I do it and I’m just an angry lesbian ruining all the fun and banter.” She’s right that angry stand-up has long been the province of men, and that there’s a double standard, but comedy isn’t frozen in time. We’re at a moment when I suspect audiences are not as interested in hearing from angry male comics, and yet the work of Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks laid the groundwork that allows us to see Gadsby’s roaring polemic wrapped in jokes as firmly part of a stand-up tradition. The best defence against Gadsby’s assault on comedy is her own show — an irony she is clearly aware of, and even perhaps nods to in a tangent about the ridiculousness of gendered parenting.
Instead of dressing babies in pink or blue, she proposes they all wear blue, pointing out that the colour evokes a cool temperature while also being the shade of the hottest part of a flame. “Blue has the flexibility to accommodate contradiction,” she says. So does great art, which is why the paradox at the heart of this remarkable show — it’s a comedy arguing against comedy — actually elevates it. How funny is that?
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Don’t miss it
Hannah Gadsby: Nannette is now streaming on Netflix.
