‘People who want to hate me — there’s nothing I can do about it.’
‘People who want to hate me — there’s nothing I can do about it.’
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Hannah Gadsby on Comedy Trolls, Anti-Vaxxers and Burying Her Dog
ByDavid MarcheseMay 25, 2020
‘People who want to hate me — there’s nothing I can do about it.’
Hannah Gadsby on Comedy Trolls, Anti-Vaxxers and Burying Her Dog
By David Marchese
With her groundbreaking one-woman show ‘‘Nanette,’’ Hannah Gadsby was determined to make people reconsider some of the too-comfortable assumptions they might’ve had about the nature and interrelationship of comedy and trauma. The ambition of the work, and the fury with which it made a case for how comedy and storytelling often serve to silence those on the margins, was impressive. That its creator succeeded in fulfilling those ambitions was even more so: The Netflix version of ‘‘Nanette’’ went viral, spawning a broad and divisive discourse and turning the previously obscure Australian into a star. (In the special, Gadsby declared that the show would be her last, as she was done participating in the self-deprecation that comedy often demanded of its non-straight-white-male practitioners.) Now, Gadsby, who is 42, is back with a new Netflix special, ‘‘Douglas,’’ which adds the subject of her autism diagnosis to the once-again combustible mix. It turns out, Gadsby said about her return, that ‘‘stand-up is the only thing I know how to do.’’
You talked in “Nanette” about the way that jokes intended to beself-deprecating can wind up being humiliatinginstead. How did your handling of that problem change betweenthen and “Douglas”?I’mdifferent. I’ve changed, and my position in the world has changed. I’ve become a high-status comedian. I built my career on writing jokes apologizing for myself. It’s what most people do. You have to explain who you are, and you point to a difference that you have. That’s your angle. But when it becomes the only reason you speak, it becomes an issue; all your material revolves around why you’re different. The great freedom post-“Nanette” was that I’d put all that on the table. Even though what I’m talking about in “Douglas” — being a woman with autism — is not widely chatted about, “Nanette” was much different tonally.But that’s trauma.
In “Douglas,” you describe the alienation you’ve felt as a result of your autism. Do you see that as different from trauma?Look, trauma is a very difficult and not well-understood area. But certainly what I did with ‘‘Nanette’’ was I broke free of a lot of trauma that was very difficult to live with. I had a lot of psychiatrists and psychologists reach out to me like, ‘‘We don’t know what this would be doing to your brain,reliving a trauma night after night.’’I cried after pretty much every performance, and I’m not a crier — dead inside. I’d like to think that perhaps watching ‘‘Nanette’’ helped other people stir up their trauma in a different way, that they could hold it differently, which could help a process of healing. And then the #MeToo movement sort of fit into that, and that was just a really lovely thing for me, because I was going, ‘‘Gah!’’ and then the whole world almost was going, ‘‘Yeah, us too!’’ The autism of it is a complicating factor, because I couldn’t have written ‘‘Nanette’’ without understanding that I had autism. I don’t read the world the way other people read it. Was I going somewhere with this?
Autism and trauma.Yeah, so there’s still a lot of anxiety that comes with autism. I can be inadvertently rude, and that worries me. I don’t want to be. That’s why I study people. I know what people are going to do before they’re going to do it. I’m like, ‘‘They’re going to do that thing,’’ then they do that thing, and they’re like, ‘‘Oh, you’re a witch.’’ I think autism gets easier in a sense as you get older because you have more information. You’re collecting the data. When you’re really young, you don’t have all the data. I was fairly intelligent but dumb as bricks.
How were you dumb as bricks?I didn’t understand things. The amount of times people have said to me, ‘‘Sometimes I think you’re a genius, but other times I think you’re’’ — people have used the r-word. So a certain amount of trauma goes with that. I think a helpful way for everybody to think about it is that I’m not on the spectrum: Everybody is on a spectrum. The human brain is on a spectrum, just as gender is. Women with autism are a really interesting demographic. Until I had the diagnosis, I thought, Yeah, I’m a butch lesbian. But everything that makes me butch are decisions I made because of sensitivities or logic that have to do with my autism. I don’t wear frills, because if I wear frills I think about it all day. I can’t grow my hair, because if I have my hair around my face I think about it all day. There’s a lot about me that people are like, ‘‘Ah, look, lesbian,’’ and really it’s about me not wanting to think about my physical self so I can just get on with things.
And it has nothing to do with aesthetics or what you think is attractive?Well, I don’t experience the world as people looking at me. I forget that I’m in the room. If I could have been more feminine, I would have been.Where I grew up,that would’ve made my life a whole lot easier. I just didn’t understand how people saw me. There’s a complicated connection between gender, sexuality and biology that, even though it’s at the center of who I am, I don’t think I’m capable of understanding.
“Douglas” is also about using comedy to demonstrate the unique processes of the autistic mind. I’m thinking now of that bit you do about driving your grade-school teacher crazy because of the overly literal way you interpreted her lesson about prepositions. But then there are other parts of the special, like when you criticize anti-vaxxers for being afraid of autism, where your thinking feels much more commonplace as far as those particular arguments go. Do you think of those sides of what you do as being in counterpoint?With the anti-vax stuff, it’s notwhatI’m saying that makes it interesting. It’swhoI am saying it that makes it interesting. I have autism. That is a political statement, because we are not part of the anti-vax conversation and that infuriates me. It’s anti-vaxxers saying autism is worse than polio, or other people saying anti-vaxxers are stupid. Autism is not a prison. It’s not something that should be terrifying. It is not a disability except that the world makes it incredibly difficult for us to function — and no one is asking what people with autism think.
You spend time in the new specialresponding to your online trolls.Why not just ignore them? Isn’t devoting time to them a way of giving them power?These people are actually humans. They live and they say things and they mean it, and I can’t believe that in all aspects of their life they’re that crazy. I don’t want to live in a vacuum where I’m like, There arethosepeople with dumb ideas. I want them to know their ideas are dumb butthey’renot dumb. People who want to hate me — there’s nothing I can do about it. And there are a lot of middle-aged women who are going to make their husbands watch “Douglas,” so there’s a lot in the show for them. That’s why I end the show on such silliness. It ends on a dick joke. Several. It’s a very genital-heavy show.
One thing that got people talking about “Nanette” was the argument you made in it about how the setup/punch line structure of stand-up comedy isfueled by trauma.But “Douglas,” and the work of a lot of other comedians, suggests ways in which comedy can be more varied than you gave it credit for. How much was that earlier idea shaped by the rhetorical necessities of having written a polemical show?What I was talking about there is club comedy. Because that’s the world that built comedy. Our comics come out of this gladiatorial setup/punch line shock. People celebrate club comedy like it is the art form. I love long-form comedy, but in order to get to that place where you can perform it, you’ve got to fight it out in the clubs. I know how to do that. I know how to tear someone a new [expletive]. I don’t feel good about it. I don’t like going onstage after other people who’ve done rape jokes, and that’s how I had to cut my teeth: Make a group of people who’ve just laughed at a rape joke laugh.
Is there a way for that kind of material to transcend misogyny or pain?People think that if you get up onstage, a joke is funny or it’s not. No. The audience is participating in this conversation. The audience brings their own baggage. So I would never say you cannot do rape jokes. I’m just saying can we please acknowledge that women get raped? Men also. People get raped, and it’s traumatizing, and we do not have a language or a narrative in which to place that wider trauma. So just having throw-away punch lines, sure, you can do it, but people get triggered, and the reason people get triggered is because other people don’t care. They’re like, “We think it’s funny; get over yourself.” That’s because there’s no broader cultural context for the viewpoint of people who’ve been traumatized. I don’t believe in censorship, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to say, “Hey, be better.”
Who are some comedians who showed you that stand-up could do interesting things beyond the setup-punch line format?I didn’t think about comedy when I first started. I landed from another planet. There’s a national competition thatruns in Australia called RAW Comedy.It’s open to anyone. I entered it having never been onstage before. And the first year I did that, I was homeless. I’d been planting trees as a job and injured myself quite badly and couldn’t work but hadn’t earned enough money to qualify for any meaningful compensation. Plus, having the kind of autism I have, I don’t know how to navigate basic administration, to fill out forms. I was desperate. I was living in a tent. No money. No phone. Nothing. I look back and go, ‘‘There was a fair chance life could have taken another turn, and I doubt if I’d be alive.’’ I now have money and am doing well, but I represent a demographic, by and large, who do not do well.People with autism have shorter lives.But I entered that competition, and I did this weird story about my dog dying. I began thinking about it as a homeless person. Where do you bury your dog? It’s rather expensive to get your pet cremated. You can’t just go and bury your dog in someone else’s yard. The whole bit was kind of dark. I ended up getting to the state final. I didn’t win. The following year, the competition rolled around again, and I entered again, but I won. What I realize now is like, ‘‘Wow, this is a classic rags-to-riches story.’’ But there were deep levels of shame about my circumstance that I played down. I was like, ‘‘Aw, I was drifting a bit.’’ No, I was homeless. It was awful. So where I started with comedy: I had already developed my voice before I began thinking about other people’s voices.
Was it hard, in the wake of “Nanette,” to contextualize having finally found success by digging so deeply into a painful experience? I could imagine that causing some ambivalence.The success was very easy for me to contextualize, in the sense that it was a moment much bigger than me. “Nanette” is a good piece of work, but it could’ve gone out in the world and been forgotten. It’s just the fact of streaming and the #MeToo moment that it landed in — there was a lot of circumstance that drove me to this level. Iwasfrightened after “Nanette” went on Netflix. I didn’t understand the attention. I was in Los Angeles, and people want stuff, and everyone’s so shiny. Everyone’s neat. I had the kind of meetings that people would murder for, and I was not ready for it because I’d come off the back of this excruciating tour performing “Nanette.” I had nothing, and people were like, “Now let’s imagine your future!”
So why did you come back? I don’t mean this crassly, but I assume you had financial opportunities that weren’t there before. Did that have anything to do with it?No, not really. I wrote ‘‘Nanette’’ assuming I would lose an audience. To write that show, I sat down with myself and said, ‘‘Look, you may not make a living out of stand-up anymore.’’ I was prepared to do that; I organized a few shifts at my brother’s fruit-and-vegetable shop. So it’s not a huge motivation to have the kind of money that doesn’t seem real to me. A Netflix deal is fantastic, but it hasn’t changed my life, because I keep my life small. That’s a long-winded way of saying: not about the money. Coming back was more about controlling my voice in the world. My brain is constantly creating, making connections. It was going to be unhealthy for me not to put something different out. I decided the best thing to do is what I know. And that is to create a show.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.
David Marchese is a staff writer and the Talk columnist for the magazine.