From The Comic's Comic

Finally putting an internal comedy debate to bed

SPOILER ALERT! If you have not yet watched Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix special, Nanette, released in June 2018 following a world tour of the show throughout 2017, then this piece undoubtedly will ruin any surprising turns of phrase and punchlines for you.

Gadsby won the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award (formerly the Barry Award) in 2017 for Nanette, and followed up that summer with the Best Comedy Show award at the Edinburgh Fringe. Her Netflix special earned her the Peabody Award, as well as the 2019 Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special.

And yet a loud contingent from within the comedy community has scoffed at Nanette, claiming her work shouldn’t be considered comedy. Perhaps most recently and loudly, Dave Chappelle dropped her name in an Instagram video recorded at one of his live shows, mockingly listing demands to be met before he’d sit down with critics, transgender or otherwise: “First of all, you cannot come if you have not watched my special from beginning to end. You must come to a place of my choosing at a time of my choosing, and thirdly, you must admit that Hannah Gadsby is not funny.”

My colleague Megh Wright over at Vulture playfully poked at Michael Che over the years, asking if Che had seen Nanette yet.

But has Chappelle watched her special from beginning to end?

Have any of Gadsby’s critics?

I went back and rewatched Gadsby’s Nanette and took note of the laughs from the audience, and whether a joke (set-up/punchline) had preceded it. The results, as they say in clickbait land, might shock you!

OK, so yeah, the official trailer from Netflix, with its own musical score, does play up the less comedic aspects of Nanette.

But a minute into the special, she lands her first laugh with a straightforward barb that comedians tend to use after they take the stage to thunderous or prolonged applause. In Gadsby’s case, she says: “Might’ve peaked a bit early.”

• 30 seconds later, by 1:41, she gets laughs describing the title of her show. “So interesting, Nanette. I thought, ‘I reckon I can squeeze a good hour of laughs out of you, Nanette, I reckon.” Pause. “But. Turns out…no.” Laughter.

• 2:00: “I don’t feel comfortable in a small town. I get a bit tense. Mainly because I am this situation,” she says, waving her hands in front of her torso. “And in a small town, that’s all right from a distance. People are like, ‘Oh, good bloke!’ And then…” Big laugh. “they get a bit closer and it’s like, ‘Oh, no! No! Trickster woman, what are you doing?” Big laugh. Tag: “I get a lot of side-eye.” More laughs.

• 2:30: Titters after she describes Tasmania as that little island “off the arse end” of Australia. Reliable laugh provoked by typical hick joke about Tasmania: “Famous for a lot of things…potatoes…and our frighteningly small gene pool,” followed by more laughs at her tag: “I wish I was joking.”

• 2:53: Small laughs at her referring back to the potato, followed by a larger laugh at: “And not all the branches go directly away from the trunk in our family tree, I will admit.” Then another laugh at her tag: “It’s a bit topiary.”

• 3:18: “I had to leave when I found out I was a little bit lesbian” “And you do find out, don’t you?” “I got a letter.” Big laugh at that punch, then “Dear Sir/Madam” laugh at tag.

• 3:53: “Wisdom is relative…and in a place like Tasmania, everything’s very relative.” Laugh at her tag/callback.

• 4:52: After a smaller laugh on how Tasmanians used to tell gays to leave the island, she gets a bigger laugh on how growing up in the 1990s, most of the media she read about homosexuality came through letters to the editor in the newspaper. To which she quipped: “Slow Twitter. Brutal.”

Then comes this chunk, which Netflix broke out for its own YouTube clip in 2020, two years after the special’s release.

From five minutes into her act to the 9:30 mark, she gets in the following laugh lines:

• On the homophobic focus on gay men: “Anal sex. That’s when the devil will get ya!”

• On the lack of focus on lesbians: “Do they even exist if no one’s watching, really?” Tagged with: “No harm in a cuddle.” Then Gadsby compares her knowledge on lesbians to that of unicorns: “There are no facts about unicorns.”

• On watching the Sydney Pride Parade on TV: “They’re busy, aren’t they?”

• “I used to sit there and watch it and go, where do the quiet gays go?”

• “My favorite sound in the whole world is the sound of a teacup finding its place on a saucer.” Laughter. “Oh, it’s very, very difficult to flaunt that lifestyle in a parade.”

• “But the flag itself? Bit busy.” Laughter. “It’s just six very shouty, assertive colors, stacked on top of each other, no rest for the eye.” Laughter. “An afternoon of that waving in my face, I need to express my identity through the metaphor of a nap.”

• On receiving feedback immediately after a show, she says sarcastically: “That is when my skin is at its thickest.”

• On that feedback being that Gadsby didn’t include enough lesbian content in her show, she gets an applause break by saying: “I’d been onstage the whole time.” More laughs at her tag: “I didn’t even straighten up halfway through, you know?”

So the first 10 minutes of her act has proven pretty jokey.

After getting a laugh with the sarcastic line about how her early stand-up shows joked about homophobia and “really solved that problem,” Gadsby makes a first pass at telling the story about a confrontation with a man at a bus stop.

• 11:08: A knowing laugh from the audience as Gadsby, acting out the attacker’s dialogue, says: “Sorry, I got confused. I thought you were a f-ing f-ot, trying to crack onto my girlfriend.”

• 12:07: On her mom wishing Hannah hadn’t come out to her… “That is not something I need to know. What if I told you that I was a murderer?” Pause for laughs. “And it’s a fair call. Murderer. Murderer. you would hope that’s a phase.” More laughs, then applause as she does finger guns.

• 12:53: “I realized…in that moment…that I’d quite forgotten to come out to Grandma.” Instead, she replied: “Nah, I don’t have time for boyfriends” Pause fo laughs. “Plural!” More laughs.

Over the next minute, she gets a series of smaller laughs as she imagines following her grandmother’s advice to keep a lookout for Mr. Right.

• 14:43: On whether she does enough to still qualify as a lesbian? “I mean, I keep my hand in” elicits laughs, followed by Gadsby bowing.

• 15:15 On how she cooks more than she engages in lesbian activities: “But nobody ever introduces me as that chef comedian, do they?”

Netflix released this clip in 2019, a year after Nanette came out.

• 15:34: “What sort of comedian can’t even make the lesbians laugh?” Pause “Every comedian ever.”

• 16:12: On that previous joke: “It was written, you know, well before even women were funny.”

This is where Gadsby first suggests her need to quit performing comedy.

• 19:10: On a letter suggesting Gadsby was really transgender, “That was new information to me.”

• 19:28: An applause break after she declared: “I identify…as tired.”

• 20:02: On pink versus blue as gender colors. “You know what’s weird? Pink headbands on bald babies.” Laughs and an applause break. “That’s weird. I mean, seriously. Would you put a bangle on a potato?” Then: “I don’t assume bald babies are boys. I assume they’re angry feminists, and I treat them with respect.”

• 21:26: On the logic that men and women are different? “Dogs are heaps differenter.” “Men are from Mars, and Women are for his penis.”

• 23:12: On the benefits of blue as a color, Gadsby suggests adding it as a traffic light. “Less road rage. More accidents, ironically enough.”

• 24:17: After earning laughs on an act-out of a customer service rep struggling to correct themselves in front of her after calling her Sir, she pivots to her disdain over being called Madam, too. “Because madam is a very triggering word for me. It is. It’s what my mom used to call me when I was in a lot of trouble!…for opening a brothel.”

• 24:57: “I don’t identify as transgender, but I’m partial to a holiday.” Laughter. “I love being mistaken for a man, because just for a few moments, life gets a hell of a lot easier. I’m top-shelf normal. King of the humans. I’m a straight white man!” Laughter and applause. “I’m about to get good service for no f-ing effort!” “Do not apologize. I was going to take my assigned seat and both the armrests.” “Your knee space? No.”

• 25:48: “I wouldn’t want to be a straight white man. Not if you paid me. Although the pay would be substantially better.” Laughter and applause.

• 26:39: “It’s just locker room talk” earns laughter and applause at the end of a series of barbs directed at offended straight white men.

• 27:09: “Do you know why I love picking on straight white men? Telling jokes about straight white men? ‘Cause they’re such good sports.” Laughter. Tags, final tag: “Cause you need a good role model right now, fellas.” Laughter and applause.

• 28:18: Callback to the advice the men would give her for getting offended or uptight? “How about a good dicking? Get a cock up ya! Drink some jizz!”

• 28:49: “Laughter’s the best medicine, they say. I don’t. I reckon penicillin might give it the nudge.” 

• 29:25: On laughter releasing tension, so it’s better in a large group. “Mainly because when you laugh alone, that’s mental illness, and that’s a different kind of tension.” laughs

• 31:40: On her art history degree. “They were dead then. They’re just deader.” “My CV is pretty much just a cock and balls drawn under a fax number.”

• 33:40: On responding to a man after a show with feedback about Vincent Van Gogh. “I tore that man a college debt-sized new asshole.” She gets laughs while recounting her full response, then tags it all with: “If you like sunflowers so much, buy a bunch and jerk off into a geranium!” which gets an applause break.

• 36:12: On people telling her to stop being so sensitive: “And it is always yelled. Which I find insensitive.”

• 36:40: “I feel a little bit like a nose being lectured by a fart.” “Not the problem.”

• 37:53: On her mother saying how she proud she was of her kids. “I have no idea why she brought that up in Target.”

• 45:53: On how the Renaissance painters were deemed more successful than Van Gogh. “Oh, the Turtles? All of them.” Laughter. “They knew how to network.”

• 46:44: On her time saved not worrying about her place in the world: “I’m quite old, but look at the skin!” “Art history taught me there’s only ever been two types of women. A virgin or a whore. Most people think that Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift invented that binary. But it’s been going on thousands of years.”

• “I mean, on a technicality, I’d get virgin.” Laughter. “I know.”

• 49:02: On women in old paintings. “If you go into the galleries, you see, if a woman’s not sporting a corset and/or a hymen, she just loses all structure. Just sort of like…Awww. Just flopping about all over the place, going, ‘Oh, what does furniture?’” “Sidesaddle. Tits akimbo.” “No wonder we can’t reverse park, ladies! Dumb history women couldn’t even reverse park their ass onto a chair!” 

• 49:50: On not leaving the house without being fully dressed. “Never once have I thought, just leave a cheeky one out.”

• 53:50: On reading a Picasso quote about being 42 and having an underage mistress, while claiming both were in their prime. “Oh, I’m in my prime!” “There was no view at my peak.”

• 55:40: On not many chances to hear extended comedy bits about art history, she says “so you’re welcome” and receives laughter and an applause break.

Netflix released this chunk on YouTube in March 2021.

This final chunk on separating the art from the artist has less laughs, to be sure. But Gadsby still gets some with observations about what comedians could be joking about still.

• 57:57: A line of self-awareness: “I think she’s lost control of the tension.”

• “People feel safer when men do the angry comedy. They’re the signs of the genre. When I do it, I’m a miserable lesbian, ruining all the fun and the banter. When men do it, heroes of free speech.” laughs “I love…angry white man comedy. It’s so funny, it’s hilarious. They’re adorable. Why are they angry?” 58:35 “What’s up, little fella?” 

• 1:00:57: After telling the men to pull up their socks, she says: “How humiliating. Fashion advice from a lesbian. That is your last joke.”

Gadsby does get one more laugh, though, after addressing any men in the audience who feel she might have been persecuting them in her show: “Well spotted.”

When I first saw and reviewed Gadsby’s Nanette at the SoHo Playhouse in March 2018, I wrote: “The 40-year-old who grew up in a small town on the Tasmanian island south of Melbourne remains whip-smart. She’s equally capable of allowing a distraction to take her into witty asides as she is of crafting reliable punchlines. But some 11 years after debuting her first comedy show at Adelaide, Gadsby has come to realize some harder truths about herself.”

Turns out I’m still right, and the comedians who dismiss her are still wrong.