Hannah Gadsby: Nanette

Last year Hannah Gadsby and John Robins were announced as the first ever joint winners of Edinburgh's Best Comedy Show. I was familiar with Robins’ work because I took a punt on him when I went to see 2009 debut hour Skinny Love. Following this, I went to see his subsequent shows, making him a regular date in my Edinburgh diary. However, I hadn’t heard of Gadsby before her victory.

Gadsby and Robins with the big prize.

Native to Australia, Gadsby has done most of her work there, only relocating to Edinburgh for the arts festival. I don’t really know how her name passed me by, as on researching her it’s clear she’s been gaining plaudits for quite some time. Last year’s show Nanette though is her breakthrough – perverse, because her tour-de-force performance is about quitting comedy. Fortunately in agreeing for Netflix to document her valediction, Gadsby has preserved this hour in time for comedy fans around the world to enjoy.

Having missed her show at London’s Soho Theatre, I was thrilled when Netflix announced they would be screening it. It’s not often I look forward to a Netflix comedy special; there are so many that it’s hard to distinguish trash from treasure. With Gadsby's special though I'd done my homework. I read the articles about it oscillating between comedy and tragedy; was intrigued by the idea of it being a meditation on stand up; and loved the irony of someone setting fire to the pedestal they were put on. I was won over before it started.

Despite reading about her, I'd never seen any clips of Gadbsy. I was coming at her cold. Initially, she struck me as diffident. She shuffles on stage, adjusts her glasses and speaks softly without oratory. The ‘opening ten’ is her introduction. She tells us where she is from: Tasmania (‘little island floating off the arse end of Australia’). Then, there’s a self-deprecatory joke about her androgynous appearance: the small town don’t mind her from afar, seeing her as a ‘good bloke,’ but when they come closer their prejudice moves with them, labelling her ‘a trickster woman.’ These jibes about appearance and small towns are in most comedians’ locker and are hardly remarkable. Whereas other comics would serve up these topics for a full show though, Gadsby uses them as hors d’oeuvres for her later, more refined dishes.

As the minutes clock by the piece gets more personal. We’re told how in Tasmania it was illegal to be gay up until 1997 (remember it wasn’t until last year that Australia voted in favour of same-sex marriage). In possessing an Art History degree, Gadsby proves herself an adept painter of words. Her recollection of watching a small TV in her small town in her small living room serves as a metaphor for the small-minded society that surrounded her. The fact that in that small world she encountered ‘her people’ for the first time in an ostentatious parade of spectacle - Sydney's Mardi Gras - is a juxtaposition both tragic and funny. Her rumination of “where do the quiet gays go” when watching is hilarious – but profound too, highlighting how even in a marginal group Gadsby feels different.

At about the twenty-minute mark, Gadsby pulls the rug from under us. Those self-deprecating jokes, so well received in her opener, are now challenged. She tells us that she needs to stop doing comedy because self-deprecation isn’t about ‘humility but humiliation.’ To be given a chance to speak as an outsider she had to immolate herself, and she’s not going to do it anymore. 

Being a huge comedy fan, I’m surprised I’ve never thought of this. 

If you’re a comedian from a marginal group, the only way the audience lets you in is if through self-ridicule. Frequently, the comic is of low-status: the audience laughs at the failures that befall them. However, if you’re a comic that looks and sounds different, then you have to find the trap door and take that status even lower. If you go high, then you’ll lose the audience: why has this 'weirdo' got confidence? The only path to success? Go low.

These thoughts on comedy are put on the hob to be returned to later. Now, she’s onto gender and how hers confuses people. Again, she demonstrates a keen eye for visual images when she takes umbrage at parents who feel the need to put pink headbands on bald babies. (‘Would you put a bangle on a potato?) Like all intelligent comedians, she knows how to use a daft analogy to slaughter sacred cows. Later, she manipulates low incident for profound result when telling us of a flight attendant's embarrassment at mistaken her for a man. She describes how she enjoys the ‘holiday’ of being a white man, going into a comic assault on the patriarchy.

In action.

With her surreal collisions of mundane and mighty, daft and serious, low and high, Gadsby knows how to write jokes. Soon she’s back to the hob reflecting on the nature of these jokes, considering their construction. Comedy necessitates tension, she tells us. The great comic doesn’t just know how to make an audience laugh, but how not to make them laugh. Comedy is as much about the space in between the jokes (the set-up) as it is about the joke itself (the punch-line). Good comics know when to hold; know when to let go.

Some people might watch this show and dismiss it because it isn’t a heaving hysterical laugh-fest. For me, comedy is a broad church. There are times when I want a minister to raise the roof, serving up a bombastic sermon. There’s other times when I want to parable that’s thought-provoking and educative – sure, funny as well. The reason so many people in their formative years loved Monty Python is because they were funny school teachers. Songs about Aristotle, The Spanish Inquisition sketch, animations on Botticelli – laughter that you may not understand at the time; but when researched you laugh again with new understanding. The thing I love about Gadsby’s second half is she references people I’ve never heard mentioned in comedy: van Gogh and his Sunflowers, Picasso and Cubism, the Renaissance painters too. Aware of keeping the comedy train on track, she refers to those Renaissant guys as ‘Turtles’ and van Gogh as bad at networking; however, she balances this with a critique on artists – again the pan bubbles.

The Python's liked having fun with art too.

Towards the conclusion Gadsby isn’t diffident in her voice, but confident. In shedding her comedic skin, she becomes a butterfly. Free to fly, no longer constrained by comedy’s parameters, she boils over, taking flight, taking aim at those who have silenced her. Initially, her rhetoric is redolent of Network’s ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore,’ but this recedes into a kind of catharsis that we pray is achieved.

By the end Gadsby’s Nanette has gone from being a set of contrivances to a story with truths. If this show is her funeral to jesterdom, then it isn’t a dirge but a Viking burial. At the curtain closure she is transformed: a Valkyrie floating down river, her show beside her: a bright, burning offer to the Gods. Hopefully what lies around the corner is happiness - it would be thoroughly deserved.

Nanette is available on Netflix