Hannah Gadsby thought Nanette was going to blow up their entire career. “That kind of show?” says the comedian. “I expected it to just diminish my audience to a pinpoint.
” I can understand why. When it arrived on Netflix in 2018, Nanette – part stand-up show, part art history lesson, part therapy session, part excoriating “f**k you” to the very notion of mining trauma for laughs – was quite unlike anything that had come before it. It was a bait-and-switch, easing its audience in with what seemed like a classic self-deprecating comedy set – stories of homophobia and abuse with the sharp edges sanded off so that they could be turned into punchlines for our amusement – before Gadsby pulled back the curtain and dared us to ask ourselves why we were laughing.
“Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from someone who always exists in the margins?” they asked. “It’s not humility. It’s humiliation.
” The audience sat in silence, waiting, hoping, for the discomfort to lift, for a moment of levity. It never came. “This tension – it’s yours,” Gadsby told the crowd.
“Part of it was like: ‘f**k this’, for want of a better expression,” says the 46-year-old now. Gadsby’s speaking over video call from their native Australia, their voice quieter and slightly deeper than I’ve heard it before (they’re genderqueer and have been microdosing testosterone recently). Nanette was, they explain, a culmination of 10 years in comed.