Hannah Gadsby Stands Down: Feminist Comedy Studies

Sitting in a large auditorium at Edinburgh University, the audience of approximately two hundred hummed, tweeted, and buzzed in anticipation of stand-up comic Hannah Gadsby's much-discussed Nanette at the 2017 Fringe Festival. Within moments of taking the stage, Gadsby's performance—a feminist-queer metacommentary on comedy—distinguished itself from standard stand-up shows when she declared, "I am going to have to quit comedy."¹ She spent the next sixty minutes telling us why.² I saw Nanette again in London in November 2017 at the Soho Comedy Club. The sold-out show was at capacity, at 175. Gadsby had been performing Nanette for more than six months. She looked tired, but the show was equally powerful and emotional. I was delighted to learn that Netflix would stream Nanette, making it available to millions overnight—the content exposes and unapologetically derides sexism, gender violence, homophobia, and xenophobia.³ But I was concerned about what that would mean for consumption of the show. At a live show it is difficult to ignore the sounds of stifled tears, people hugging in the aisles, wiping their eyes, or looking stunned. We gain much in how popular Gadsby's special has become, her messages disseminated widely, but is anything lost?

This essay places Gadsby's farewell performance—an affective journey rejecting catharsis and intending to elicit emotions beyond laughter—in conversation with the field of feminist comedy studies.⁴ For Gadsby, comedy as performance practice has problems. It encourages self-deprecation, which she insists doubles as "humiliation." It also forces comics to generate humorous resolutions to any tension created, which can function to diminish the serious nature of social critique. Most important, Gadsby believes that comedy does not allow her to tell her story fully. While stand-up comedy can be an important vehicle for speaking truth to power, Gadsby often purposely omits difficult, violent truths connected to her subordinate identities, seeming to kowtow to stand-up's formulas, which elide the complexity of lived experience. For Gadsby, these are dangerous omissions. Personal testimony reveals the emotional pain of telling her story within the framework of comedy and complicates the notion of comedy as liberating, a long-standing axiom in feminist comedy studies.

Gadsby plans to quit comedy, but before shucking off that performative coil, she has a few unfunny things to say about homophobia, sexism, and internalized oppression. The intimacy of what is offered in the live show, between performer and audience, and among audience members, may be compromised with the more permissive medium of Netflix, which people watch in the comfort of their own homes. Yet the popularity of the special following its release indicates how deeply her work has affected so many people. Just as Lady Gaga and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter use their artistry to offer new models of feminism, Gadsby likewise models a feminist critique of the limitations of stand-up.⁵

About Nanette, Hannah Gadsby says: "It's a show where I decided to see how people would react to a story that I have made funny—but also reveal that it isn't really a funny story. … That is what Nanette is—to show how much you have to adapt in order to make an audience laugh."⁶ In Gadsby's adaptations, we lose essential parts of the story because—told straight—they would not have elicited laughter.

According to her, comedy's formula is fairly simple. First, the comic introduces the premise for the joke; this setup primes the audience for the delivery of the punch line. Gadsby asserts that repetition of this pattern throughout a show does not allow for the context necessary to tell a full story, which, in the Netflix release, she defines as having "a beginning, a middle, and an end." In an interview, Gadsby explains, "Everything I do evolves—I started by looking at a story I told during my first show. … It ended in violence—but I had stopped short of telling the real story. I thought, what happens if I tell the story properly? But when I started doing that I realised it...