As a young girl raised on stand-up comedy — mostly stand-up comedy performed by straight white men — I received a thorough education in the importance of not being earnest. The funniest (and therefore coolest) people turned life into a punch line. This was the lesson I look from the Lenny Bruces and Larry Davids and the Louis C.K.s and the Norm MacDonalds of the world, who viewed everything that happened to them — including the awful things they experienced and the awful things they did — through a screen of ironic detachment. Through comedy, flaws became something to laugh about; through self-deprecation, the ugliest things in life became palatable, redeemable, even cool. I took this message to heart, and for a long time, it informed the way I interacted with the world. Nobody could put me down if I put myself down first and funnier, I thought, and ultimately it was okay to be a dick if you got a good story out of it. It was better to be funny than to care.
Of course, in 2018, it’s harder than ever to believe that ironic detachment is the best way to view the world — or that detachment is anything but a luxury of privilege, one not everyone can afford. But whatever nostalgic attachment I still might have to the idea of a life lived through punch lines was punctured by Hannah Gadsby’s incredible new stand-up special Nanette, now on Netflix. It might be the most remarkable subversion of the medium since Tig Notaro’s game-changing cancer set, and it’s further proof that queer women are comedy’s most important innovators working today.
Gadsby, a well-known Australian comic, begins the set with a series of funny riffs on her gender and sexual identity, material that will be familiar to fans of her work, talking about what it was like growing up lesbian in Tasmania in the ’80s and ’90s, in a conservative community where 70 percent of people thought homosexuality was a sin. “For a long time I knew more facts about unicorns than I did about lesbians,” she jokes amiably. She deftly unveils stories about the hardships she faced growing up — for instance, the time a man threatened to beat her up for talking to his girlfriend at a bus stop — and then punctures them with a laugh line. Upon realizing she wasn’t “a faggot,” the man apologized and said “Oh sorry, I don’t hit women, I got confused, I thought you were a fuckin’ faggot trying to crack onto my girlfriend.” “What a guy!” she riffs. We laugh along with Gadsby, as she makes her story of suffering entertaining for a mass audience.
Then, midway through the set, a switch flips. She turns suddenly serious. She announces that she thinks she has to quit comedy, and she offers us no punch line to defuse what she’s said. Why is she quitting? Because to be self-deprecating when you’re already someone who lives in the margins “is not humility, it’s humiliation,” she declares. “I simply won’t do that anymore, not to myself or anybody who identifies with me.” Read more via the Cut