Why I never want to watch Nanette again

IT may be one of the most talked about comedy specials to hit Netflix in recent times, but Hannah Gadsby’s opus is something I hope to never revisit, writes Matilda Dixon-Smith.

WHEN my boyfriend and I made plans to watch Nanette, Hannah Gadsby’s acclaimed comedy special on Netflix, I joked to him that I refused to watch without a bottle of wine handy.

Really, I was only half-joking, because I remember distinctly what it was like to see Nanette in its earlier iteration as a stand-up show at the 2017 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. It’s an experience that’s hard to forget.

I sat in tense, horrified silence watching Gadsby deliver her show at the Forum Theatre last year — which, at the time, was billed as her comedic swan song. Her voice was ragged from yelling into the microphone night after night during the festival’s four-week run. She looked somehow simultaneously exhausted, furious and also triumphant.

And while, as a comedy special on Netflix, Nanette has been given a glossy tidy-up to appeal to a wider online audience, its impact as a recorded show remains largely the same.

It’s not exactly what you’d expect from a comedy show. And while the experience is profound and, I believe, deeply essential to the global moment we’re having addressing trauma and violence right now, I still feel this intractable sorrow when I think not just of the show itself, but also everything Gadsby had to put into it to finally find her voice and be heard.

Which is why, as much as I love and respect Gadsby’s comedy, I never want to see another show like Nanette again. I can’t; it will break my heart.

“I do think I have to quit comedy though,” Gadsby says about midway through Nanette. “It’s probably not the forum to be making such an announcement … But I’ve been questioning this whole comedy thing.”

This was how Nanette was billed back in 2017, during MICF: as Gadsby’s final show before her retirement from comedy. No one was quite sure if the pronouncement was genuine, or simply a device around which to frame Nanette. Nevertheless, it piqued everyone’s curiosity and Nanette sold out its MICF run, not least because of rapid word-of-mouth that pegged the show as “unlike anything you’ll see in comedy”.

Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette is unlike anything ever seen in comedy before. (Pic: Netflix)

Ironically, Nanette has since made a comedy queen of Gadsby, kickstarting her international career in a way most Australian comedians can only dream of. How can you claim to be quitting comedy when the New York Times is running a headline introducing you as “A Major New Voice In Comedy”, or when The Atlantic is calling your show a “radical, transformative work”?

Still, Gadsby tells Vulture her pronouncement that she was “quitting comedy” felt genuine, at least to her, during the beginning stages of Nanette. “At the start … it was more furious: “Well, I’m quitting!” It’s like throwing a grenade, so it became that.

“Whenever I sold it, it went better than if it was just a throwaway line. So I completely sold it, and I sold it to myself.”

Gadsby has spent over a year touring Nanette — and has landed the Netflix special and a book deal amid the turbulence — and her set in Montreal is billed as the show’s (though not Gadsby’s) final-ever outing. But there’s an inherent discomfort in the fact that so much truth comes from Gadsby divorcing herself from the art form to which she has devoted a two-decade career.

Onstage, Gadsby breaks down the structure of a joke as a set-up and a punchline. She explains that you can’t truly tell a story — especially a traumatic story, like her ones about homophobia and assault — using this format because they omit the ending. Stories, Gasdby tells us, are really told in three parts: beginning, middle and end.

And this is how Nanette becomes an exercise in such profound discomfort for Gadsby’s audience: she builds up tension, as any comedian does with the set-up of any joke, but she doesn’t drop a punchline to relieve us. It’s a masterful manipulation of the easy expectations we have when entering any comedy show, the implicit contract we have with the comedian that no matter how far they go with their jokes, they’ll always relieve us of tension — and, perhaps, of the necessary afterthought that comes with it.

What’s depressing about Nanette is that Gadsby felt so excommunicated from her audience, community and art form. (Pic: Netflix)

What’s depressing about Nanette is that Gadsby felt so excommunicated from her audience, from her community of fellow comedians, from the very art form she’s relied on to make her career, that she could only create the brilliant Nanette under the self-imposed condition that she’d leave comedy after performing it. For a person like Gadsby, who has lived on the margins, truth comes at the expense of admission.

Gadsby is lucky; for whatever reason, the unique and form-breaking Nanette seems to have kicked comedy and comedy-lovers into high gear. Instead of “breaking” comedy, or turning away audience members in disgust, Gadsby has invited everyone to think about compelling new ways to use the comedic form to be more inclusive. Which is brilliant, and so important.

Perhaps it’s because of the moment. As communities both global and local, we are enduring a process of social upheaval regarding how we view privilege and violence and respect and trauma. These processes may by slow, painful, cyclical and who knows if, ultimately, they will have any lasting impact; regardless, Nanette sits perfectly in that Zeitgeist. It doesn’t feel like a swan song, it feels like an awakening.

Still, I don’t want to position a show like Nanette as only able to be created under the immense pressure of leaving a community, walking backwards out the door and flipping off your haters as you go. Because real change needs to be agitated for outside and inside the margins, supported on both sides. And agents of change need support as they step forward to tell the truth; we cannot abandon the people brave enough to stand up for social evolution.

As understandable as it is to assume that a show like Nanette will break you away from the male-dominated art form of comedy, I have to believe that these kinds of radical changes can come from within, and be appreciated from those on the inside with enough empathy to be introspective. Otherwise, how will we ever really change anything?

Let’s hope Gadsby’s blockbuster success is proof of that.

Matilda Dixon-Smith is a Melbourne-based writer.

@mdixonsmith