Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Nanette’ Is Daring, Essential Comedy, and It Should Make Her a Huge Star

The kaleidoscope of emotions you’ll go through watching Hannah Gadsby’s stand-up special Nanette on Netflix is not to be underestimated. The Australian comedian (she’s from Tasmania, “the little island floating off the ass end of Australia”) begins by charming her audience in the way so many comics do, peppering personal anecdotes with observational details, delivered with a kind of bemused semi-detachment. But that’s just the first movement. Like a symphony or something else sufficiently artistic and intricately constructed, Gadsby’s routine moves and builds; it changes shape, shifts tone, and becomes something else entirely, all focused on one disarming thesis: the limits of comedy to tell stories of great trauma.  It is by a wide margin the most daring and emotionally activating piece of comedy I’ve experienced in a long time, and it deserves to make Hannah Gadsby a huge fucking star.

While Hannah Gadsby has been better known in her native Australia, up until now, the only chance American audiences have had to know her is for her performance on the comedy series Please Like Me. The series, an Aussie relationship comedy themed around things like gay relationships, friendship, and mental illness, originally aired in Australia and then moved to American TV on Pivot. Its four seasons are currently available to stream on Hulu. On the show, Gadsby played Hannah, a depressive who was introduced as a patient at Josh’s mom’s group home but who eventually integrated into the main group of the cast. Only knowing Gadsby as Hannah on Please Like Me made for an interesting companion while watching Nanette. The fictional Hannah character dovetails with the real Hannah’s stand-up style quite well; there’s a sense that her low-key, unexcitable persona has some real depths behind it. That sense is correct.

The early parts of Nanette are often reminiscent of Ellen Degeneres’s post-coming-out HBO specials. Observational comedy, tumbling down linguistic rabbit holes (there’s a really clever riff on the color blue as pertaining to gender), but with a bit of a bite always hanging in the background. There’s also the kind of comedy you might expect from a queer performer: funny coming out stories featuring her mother and grandmother; anecdotes about the incongruity of her queer self in straight spaces. These bits are funny, because Gadsby is effective and disarming in the telling of them.

It’s unusual to walk away from a comedy special raving about the structure of it rather than the laughs, but it’s impossible to watch Nanette without marveling at how Gadsby builds out her routine. Part of that is because Gadsby keeps pulling the curtain back on that very structure. About 20 minutes into the show, Gadsby declares that she’s swearing off self-deprecating humor. Because, as a lesbian woman who stands out as demonstrably different, gender-wise, self-deprecation carries a different context. “It’s not humility,” she says, “It’s humiliation. I put myself in order to speak. In order  to seek permission to speak. And I simply will not do that anymore; not to myself nor to anybody that identifies with me.”

About 30 minutes into the show, Gadsby says she thinks she has to get out of comedy. It’s become insufficient as a means to tell her story. She goes into some detail about the tension and release of a joke, how the release of that tension is meant to connect the audience together. “I’m tired of tension,” Gadsby reveals. “Tension is making me sick.”

From here, Gadby begins to (subtly, gradually) dismantle and deconstruct her entire routine. The bit about her mom’s reaction to her coming out obscured the more important part of that story, which is that she and her mum share a great relationship now.

Gadsby then delves into art history, of all things. She speaks of Van Gogh and Picasso and how the way we speak about them is all wrong. The perspective on Van Gogh is that if he didn’t suffer from mental illness, we wouldn’t have gotten all those pretty sunflowers. We accept Picasso having sex with an underage girl because he invented cubism. It’s fucked, and Gadsby is very funny in explaining why.

About 60 minutes into the show, Gadsby completely turns her entire routine on its head, pulling the rug out from under the audience with a series of devastating turnabouts. It’s unlike anything you’re going to see on TV. In those ten minutes, Gadsby exposes the limits of comedy to deal with something like trauma, like devastation. She’s walked right out to the edge of where comedy can take her stories and, finding the end of that road, she steps boldly forward anyway.