Her First Time at the Mic

Ms. Gadsby studied art history and curatorship at Australian National University in Canberra. She worked at a bookshop and at an outdoor cinema as a projectionist, then became an itinerant farmhand. She was adrift.

In her late 20s, on a whim, she entered an open mic competition sponsored by the Melbourne Comedy Festival. It was a weird decision, but she was making a lot of those back then. She was also technically homeless at the time, she said.

She knew she was funny. “It’s how I participated in life without participating,” she said. Her first time at the mic, she did a surreal bit about freezing her dead dog. (“I’ve always been very uplifting.”)

She made it to the state finals, and felt preternaturally comfortable onstage. “I’m frightened of smaller interactions, but I could talk to a large room almost immediately, which is, you know, a backward wiring,” she said.

In retrospect, her inability to engage with the world in standard fashion was related to her autism. “I could never reconcile how I could be both childlike and really, really smart,” she said. “Like, I’ve got an incredibly high IQ, but I can’t read a bus timetable.” As she began doing comedy, her siblings — she is the youngest of five — helped her out with housing, and her parents (her father is a retired math teacher) supported her career choice. To navigate the neurotypical world, she said, she now knows, “I always need external scaffolding.” (Autism in women is underdiagnosed, researchers say. The revelation often comes later in life, because the signs that are familiar in men may not exist for women, and it’s largely men whose conditions have been studied. For Ms. Gadsby, the diagnosis was “both a devastating and wonderful moment.”)

Ms. Gadsby’s family knew some of the trauma she had been through, but when they came to see “Nanette” early on, she modified it because, she said, it was “unfair to subject them to that kind of sucker punch in a roomful of strangers.”