“A joke is a question, artificially inseminated with tension,” she says, before explaining the mechanics of her job. “I make you all tense and then I cure it with a laugh. And you say: ‘Thanks for that, I was feeling a bit tense.’” Then in one of many tonal shifts, she raises her voice, irritated at the audience’s hypothetic gratitude: “But I made you tense!”

Then she points to the audience and back at her and quips, darkly: “This is an abusive relationship.”

Skepticism about comedy, which dates at least to Plato, is older than the romanticized view that prevails today, undergirding both the comics who champion it as well as critics who suggests the best jokes punch upward and are rooted in truth. Ms. Gadsby is at her most radical pushing back on this idea, explaining that funny comedy isn’t always honest, and in fact rewards deception.

She said that in her homophobic town, she lived with shame that she turned into comedy, but that she paid a price. She never entirely grew out of her own self-hatred. When she retells her story without the jokes, it’s bracing. By stopping at the punch line, she says, she froze “an incredibly formative experience at its trauma point and sealed it off with jokes.”

In explaining how she turned her story of coming out of the closet into a bit, she upends the cliché of the comic who finds salvation by turning pain into laughter.

This is a show where, more than once, the performer makes the crowd laugh and laugh and, suddenly, turn deadly silent. She also nimbly leaps from personal stories to big-picture analysis, including a damning digression about Picasso, whom she calls a misogynist, citing both his own statements and an affair with a 17-year-old. After drawing attention to the silliness of discussing art history in a stand-up show, she gets serious again, saying comics have been more likely to make dismissive jokes about Monica Lewinsky or “throwaway gags” about Mr. Weinstein. It’s on this subject that her jokes stop and her tone becomes grave, saying we care more about the reputations of artists like Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby than their accusers.