The writer and critic Roxane Gay, whose collection of essays Bad Feminist and memoir Hunger were critically praised bestsellers, covering everything from her past as a competitive Scrabble player to overeating, and her experiences of rape, tweeted Gadsby when her set first screened: “Nanette is simply remarkable. There was one in the New York Times – three pages. “With this whole Nanette business, he started going, ‘God, the articles are getting a bit long now. Her father, she says, has always collected anything written about her, but his task is becoming more and more demanding. Nanette’s second life turned Gadsby from a working comic into a global star, lauded for her candour and insight by everyone from Ellen Page to Monica Lewinsky.
What begins as an apparently mainstream routine segues into a story about something troubling that happened to Gadsby as a young woman, told first one way – and then, brutally, another it’s at once a deconstruction of the art form (her work has been billed as “anti-comedy”), and a critique of her audience – angry, smart, radical. This supposed swansong of a set had previously stunned audiences from Melbourne to Edinburgh, with its devastating twists on who and what jokes are for, and how suffering and trauma are turned into material. I n June, the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby’s standup show Nanette was released on Netflix.
