Nanette was billed as Hannah Gadsby’s departure from comedy. Instead, it has become the work that cemented the Australian’s career.

A deconstruction of the form, the show won the major comedy awards in Adelaide, Melbourne and Edinburgh, before she took it to the US where the New York Times dubbed Gadsby “a major new voice in comedy”. Now it’s a globally praised Netflix special, and Gadsby is a comedy star.

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Filmed at the Sydney Opera House, Nanette is the simplest of practical setups: a microphone stand, a stool, a glass of water. But the work itself is a subversion. Gadsby carefully dissects comedy as an art form, and the way it tells stories in two acts: a setup and a punchline. The way it leaves out the third act. The way her career was built on leaving out the third act: her story.



It’s not that this work – a screed against (among other things) homophobia and sexism – has come along at the right time, but that standup comedy is an art form that is innately responsive to the world it inhabits. “Artists don’t invent zeitgeists,” Gadsby says. “They respond to it.”



Nanette, the live show, was built in an Australia which was actively enacting a violence towards queer people; the year of the postal plebiscite on marriage equality and the vilification of the Safe Schools program to support LGBTIQ students. And while the hurt from that Australia still rings clear, on Netflix the show takes on global significance in the post-Weinstein, #MeToo era. Talented standups are barometers of the audience they share the room with: the reception to Nanette, which is being called a must-see by critics and a life-changer by fans, shows Gadsby to be a barometer of the people she shares the world with.

Ellen Page (@EllenPage) Holy shit #Nanette is extraordinary. Blown away by @Hannahgadsby @netflix

Ben Platt (@BenSPLATT) An excellent pride activity: watch @Hannahgadsby’s absolutely stunning special “Nanette” on @netflix. Completely blew me away.

CN Lester (@cnlester) Please allow me to be the 1000th person to tell you to watch Hannah Gadsby's "Nanette"

Gadsby holds an acute understanding of the continued power of shared space. In the recording, she never looks directly at the camera; she is there for the room on the night. The directors of the Netflix production, Madeleine Parry and Jon Olb, depart from the usual tricks deployed in filming standup. There are no cutaway shots to a laughing audience; no closeups of faces deep in thought. The filming of Nanette centres on Gadsby: the cameras only look at an audience in shadows. She is the one centred, always. In her jokes and in her anger.



We know what anger on a stage looks like. We know what it means to see a body stand in front of a crowd inciting it. The current US political climate was built on an anger used to codify separation and difference. But Gadsby’s anger isn’t divisive, it’s unifying. In the shared space of standup comedy, she has crafted a world that inspires connection.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gadsby during an interview with TV host Seth Meyers this month. Photograph: NBC/Getty Images

It’s not just that Gadsby is angry. It is that she is measured and precise in her coming to grips with the trauma inflicted upon her by the world; grappling with how she compounded this trauma by tying it up in a neat joke. Setup; punchline. One; two. No space to tease it apart, to let it breathe, to give it the space so we can grow around it, inhabit the same body as it. Setup; punchline – reinforcing the belief that if we don’t look directly at it, it can’t hurt us.

How many of us have packed away trauma? Maybe we haven’t had a standup career built on it, making people laugh at our pain as we try to ignore its magnitude. But we pack it up, as if locking it up will let us thrive and move on, where really we’re locking up parts of ourselves, too. We employ a dark humour to avoid it. We’ll bring it into our sightline for the setup, then send off a punchline that ricochets off, cheap armour masking the pain. One; two. Never a three.



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Gadsby wields her craft like a weapon, lancing out the trauma and forcing us to look at it. She can’t undo her trauma – none of us can undo our trauma – but she can live with it, grow with it. She looks at a world of people masking their trauma and gives permission for it to be seen. And by opening out from a two-act joke to a three-act story, she creates the space for audiences to build on this third act themselves.

Alexandra Whitney (@iskandrah) #Nanette also changed my life. I felt like finally someone was speaking to my lived experience in front of the whole Sydney Opera House and the words can never be taken back. @HannahGadsby truly freed us all. https://t.co/9vUTWJDxta

“What I would’ve done to have heard a story like mine,” says Gadsby, tears in her eyes, shake in her voice. Comedy, she knows, should be about punching up. (What would the world look like today, she asks, if comedians had gone after Bill Clinton and not Monica Lewinsky?) For too long, Gadsby punched down on herself. In Nanette she punches passionately both up and out, breaking open space for herself, for those who are also – finally – hearing a story like theirs.

Standup needs to be big enough to grow and warp and change in the deft hands of an artist like Gadsby

The fervent way Nanette has been received suggests as audiences we are tired of self-deprecation from female comics, from queer comics, from – as Gadsby calls herself – the “not normals”. We want the artists like Gadsby to yell and relish and stake their place. When Gadsby punches out to break open a new space for herself, she manages to break open a new space for us all. Seeing women be angry and controlled, sad and yet in power, is still all too rare. And that is why Nanette works on screen: the simplicity. Just a woman for an hour – her voice and her power – creating a space to dare to dream of a different future for ourselves, and also for comedy.

What does a swan song mean when it’s placed on Netflix as an artist’s first recorded special, and her last? Hopefully, it isn’t that Gadsby needs to leave standup – what a loss that would be – but that standup needs to be big enough to grow and warp and change in the deft hands of an artist like Gadsby. It needs to give us space to laugh, but also to cry.

Standup is, at its core, about an understanding of the power of shared space. Nanette takes that shared space and bursts it open.

