In her show Nanette, the Australian standup speaks out about homophobic and sexual violence – the set is now a Netflix sensation. She opens up about shame, rage, her autism diagnosis and the meaning of Louis CK

During the live run of Hannah Gadsby’s standup show, Nanette, she found herself sleeping 15 hours a night, then taking naps during the day. “I got bronchitis in London,” she says. “A tooth wrenched out in Edinburgh. Then I got carbon monoxide poisoning from the flat in New York. I was Googling ‘neurological disorders’, I had the tremors and my speech was slurring. I kept telling people I was really tired, texting them coffin emojis, and they’d say: ‘Of course you are, this show is exhausting.’”

But she doesn’t think you should really suffer for your art. Well, not any more. “I’m against that theory,” she says firmly.

She performed Nanette for 18 months – including a one-month stint in New York that turned into four – and has now become accustomed to people expressing concern for her wellbeing.

We meet in a crowded Melbourne cafe, and when another journalist, early for her slot, walks by, she puts a gentle hand on Gadsby’s shoulder, unbidden. Gadsby takes this in her stride. “I’ve had psychiatrists reach out to me, saying: ‘You know, there’s no precedent for what you’re doing.’ It’s been a strange old ride and I think it’s going to take a long time before I know what I’ve done to myself.”

Gadsby is keen to go incognito. The easiest way to spot her is that she is the only person in the cafe hiding their face with their hand. But anonymity may no longer be possible. Nanette went up on Netflix a month ago, and has since elicited thorough analysis in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Washington Post and Vanity Fair, while Lily Allen, Thandie Newton, Monica Lewinsky, Ellen Page and Roxane Gay have raved and/or wept about it on Twitter (in a tweet to Gadsby, Gay wrote: “You moved me and have really made me think about humour, the self, self-deprecation and the uses of anger”). Across Gadsby’s social networks, the general public also gives effusive thanks. Nanette is not merely an hour of standup. It’s a mass bloodletting.

Gadsby can’t bring herself to look right now. In fact, she has asked her manager to mute any exciting offers. “I’m living somebody else’s dream,” she says. “Now everyone wants a piece of the Gads.”

Standup comedy relies, of course, on creating tension and release. In Nanette, Gadsby exposes and then destroys that formula. She reveals experiences of homophobic and sexual violence, which escalate throughout the set, until finally she is delivering them from a precipice of rage. “This tension is yours,” she tells the stunned Sydney Opera House audience. “I am not helping you with it any more. You need to learn what this feels like.”

“I broke the contract and that’s what made this work,” she says. “I betrayed people’s trust, and I did that really seriously, not just for effect.”

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Nanette debuted at the Melbourne International Comedy festival in 2017, the year of Australia’s same-sex marriage postal plebiscite, and during fierce debate around the Safe Schools programme designed to support LGBTQI students. Homophobia was making its way back into the public sphere; a clear, disturbing regression.

In the first third of Nanette, Gadsby deconstructs the autobiographical material she has aired over the years, including a tale about nearly getting beaten up at a bus stop, which gets the audience laughing gamely. In the second, she deconstructs comedy itself, and announces her intention to quit the circuit. To use self-deprecating humour when you are already deemed worthless, she suggests, is further humiliation. In the final third, she deconstructs misogyny, including her own internalised misogyny. She had never told the full story of the bus-stop incident, for example – that the man had come back and beaten her up, that nobody had stopped him, and that she didn’t go either to the police or the hospital afterwards, because she didn’t think she was worth it. Gadsby desperately needed to hear stories like hers when she was younger, but instead had been complicit in silencing them. No more.

Gadsby grew up in small-town, bible-belt Tasmania. Homosexuality was a crime there until 1997, so – she says jovially in her set – the likes of her were supposed to “pack up your Aids in a suitcase and fuck off to Mardi Gras”. But the island state is also the butt of incest jokes from mainland Australia, so she felt instinctively protective of it. It is not the only time she has found that loyalty can be at the expense of the self; at the end of Nanette she reveals painfully, briefly, that she was sexually abused as a child and raped as a young woman, but doesn’t go into details. How that silence – within a show about breaking silence – must sting.

“It’s this murky area where you know the people and it has repercussions for their families,” she says, “so I don’t know how to put that out there in the world in a constructive and safe way for both me and all involved. We only have an existing narrative framework for a stranger doing violence to you.”

The idea of “stranger danger” persists in the collective psyche, but we now know that sexual offences against children are the crimes least likely to involve strangers. Most children will be abused by opportunists in adult relationships: the married relatives, the family friends, the pillars of the community, the good blokes. “A lot of people who have experienced trauma at the hands of people they’ve trusted take responsibility, and that is what’s toxic,” Gadsby says. “It’s bullshit that as a kid I’d care for a person that was abusing me, but you just do and that’s the horrific thing.”

Shame and rage are the twin forces behind Nanette, but rage, at least, has velocity. It is purposeful, powering her to the final third, whereas shame welds the feet to the ground. Gadsby considers this delineation. “Shame has its place,” she says. “Shame is what you do to a kid to stop them running on the road. And then you take the shame away and immediately they’re back in the fold. You should never soak anybody in shame. It’s the prolonged existence of shame that then flips out into destructive rage. We can’t exist in that. It’s like treacle.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hannah Gadsby in her show Nanette. Photograph: Ben King/Netflix

One unexpected sanctuary during the run of the show – when she was coughing up a furball of trauma night after night – was the actor Emma Thompson, to whom she has become close. Thompson contacted her after seeing Nanette in Edinburgh, and Gadsby stayed with her during the London dates. “Oh, we’re friends now; I think I can say that,” Gadsby smiles. “She described what I was doing as Promethean – tearing my liver out every night. She didn’t tell me to stop; she said: ‘You’ve got to keep doing it.’ I think that gave me permission to take more care of myself. Really, I just wanted to get to know her mum [the actor Phyllida Law]. I love Fifi.”

More remote support has come from fellow comedians; many see Nanette as a game-changer (it was the joint winner of best show at last year’s Edinburgh fringe festival). “I’ve been a professional comic for 30 years,” tweeted Kathy Griffin. “I’ve been studying comedy for even longer. I thought I had seen everything …” Kristen Schaal advised her followers there was nothing better and more important than Nanette. Writing for New York magazine’s Vulture blog, Sara Schaefer and Sabrina Jalees discussed How Nanette Will Change Standup.

The burden of talking about complex issues usually comes down to the most marginalised people. On the rare occasions that a white, heterosexual man steps up – Louis CK pointing out, for example, that “there is no greater threat to women than men” – they are hailed as heroes.

“It’s funny that it was during the process of doing this show that Louis CK came undone,” Gadsby says. “I was furious with the phenomenon of Louis CK before it even came out. I was aware of the rumours [of him masturbating in front of younger female comedians] but I wasn’t in that world, so what can you do?”

Louis CK’s predilection for talking about masturbation in his sets became a metaphor in Gadsby’s mind for the rudimentary question-answer setup of punchline jokes – “like rubbing one out” – and made her determined to pursue more sophisticated narratives. “A joke is a wank, but a story is intimacy,” she says.

Before getting into comedy, Gadsby drifted, taking a variety of jobs across different states, from planting trees to cinema projectionist – surely the introvert’s dream vocation. At one point, she was homeless. It wasn’t until she was in her late 20s, around 2006, that she tried her hand at comedy, and she credits the newfound creativity with saving her life. “Comedy is great in that it’s accessible to someone like me, from a low socioeconomic background, struggling in life. The gatekeepers are a lot stronger in other art forms.”

The darker side is that a comedy scene can harbour personalities that might be expunged from other professions. In Melbourne in June, a young female comedian, Eurydice Dixon, was murdered by a man who followed her home from the club where she had just performed. A week before our interview, a male comedian called Andy Nolch was charged with defacing the site where people had left floral tributes by painting a giant penis. The attention Dixon’s death had received, he said, was part of the media’s anti-men agenda.

“He’s obviously an unwell kid and there’s a lot of that in comedy,” says Gadsby. “It’s often young men trialling their philosophies on life, and we’ve got a generation of young men who believe that they are victimised, because they’ve been promised the world. That’s a poisoned chalice, because now there’s a gap between what the cultural narrative is and what their experience is. Looking back, I think it’s done me more good than harm to be promised absolutely nothing. I was always told I didn’t matter to the world, but the world still matters to me. That’s why I haven’t responded to the more brutal aspects of my life with violence or bitterness.”

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Gadsby is happy to be back home in Ascot Vale, the neighbouring suburb to Moonee Ponds, made famous by Dame Edna Everage. She lives a stone’s throw from her brother’s fruit-and-veg shop. Life is simple. There are her dogs and her Royal Enfield motorcycle, and she is a keen gardener. “If a documentary crew were to follow me around, they’d probably think they were making a film about the saddest person in the world,” Gadsby says, “but I’m throwing the best thought orgies.”

Three years ago, she was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. “It’s clarified why the comedy lifestyle is so difficult for me,” she says. “It’s a lot of noise and moving around.” A child wails, as if on cue, and she flinches.

Gadsby explains that people with autism have an increased sensitivity to traumatisation due to their difficulty in communicating and regulating emotions. They are also more vulnerable to becoming victims in the first place. A Swedish study this year revealed that women who screened positive for autism are nearly three times more likely to have experienced sexual abuse.

When the Australian TV celebrity Don Burke was at the centre of #MeToo allegations last year, he blamed autism for his actions – and Gadsby took aim on social media. “If there’s one thing that a spectrum brain is great at, it is identifying patterns,” she wrote. “So let me show you a fascinating pattern that I have noticed recently: Don Burke told us he had Asperger’s under the very same circumstances that Kevin Spacey came out of the closet, which is exactly the same kind of moment that Harvey Weinstein reframed himself as sex addict, and when Louis CK chose to acknowledge his peculiar special needs clause.”

Now, she points out that Nanette was built from her ability to see patterns. “Having the framework of autism boils down to not looking out to the world to see how I should exist, but knowing I don’t actually have to be social, knowing that it exhausts me and that I will get confused and look like an idiot,” she says. “Because I also know that I understand things a lot deeper than a lot of people.”

Everyone wants to know what’s next on the agenda for the Gads. Most immediately, she will be putting out her memoir, 10 Steps to Nanette, and it would surely be foolish not to capitalise on the rapturous interest in the US. “I’d never tried to crack the States because I’m not a hustler,” she says, with a modest smile. “Or an arsehole.”

Doubters may question Gadsby’s declaration in Nanette that she is quitting comedy. More accurately, she is quitting comedy as she knew it. “I thought doing this show would mean I’d have to quit because the form was not enough for me any more,” she says, “but perhaps I’ve tapped into something a lot of people have begun to think. Perhaps standup is something I do, but it doesn’t have to be standup comedy.”

Most pressing on her agenda is a beach holiday and a retreat back into privacy. “I’m 95% private,” she says. “But I really pack a lot into the 5% that is public.”