Hannah Gadsby threatened to quit comedy after testing the limitations of standup with Nanette, her 2018 one-woman show. Instead, she spent the last 18 months processing how her life has transformed since Nanette and shaping those reflections into her new Netflix special, Douglas. Just dropped on Netflix, it’s a very different but equally mold-breaking departure from stand-up norms, a charming collage of meta-comedy, observational humor, and art history lecture.
“I’ve gone from complete invisibility to rather intense visibility, and that’s… peculiar,” Gadsby tells me by Zoom, rubbing the blue beanie that covers her hair. It’s especially disorienting for someone who has mostly lived inside her own head. Gadsby was recently diagnosed with autism, which helped her understand why she felt wildly upset by things other people seemed to take for granted. “I’d come home from the supermarket angry and I just thought I was an angry person,” she says. Her whole life was a performance, presenting a front of normality that frequently exhausted Gadsby. The diagnosis enabled her to “experience the world through me first instead of watching others and going, That’s what I should be doing.”
Gadsby is sitting out the quarantine back home in Australia. Her room is casually scattered with books and reproductions of classical paintings. She’s been trying to finish a long-promised memoir, but her identity has gone through such an upheaval in the last few years that pinning it down in writing “is like redrafting your sense of self.”
Nanette was a grenade tossed into the world of comedy, blasting apart traditional assumptions about what is funny and who ends up as the punchline. By telling her story of being assaulted by a homophobic stranger in two completely different ways—first as a self-mocking joke, then later as a harrowing confession—Gadsby interfered with the traditional mechanisms by which comedians use punchlines to defuse tension and let the privileged off the hook. Forcing the audience to hover in that squirmy moment before the release of laughter, she refused to make light of her own trauma and marginalization.
Gadsby identified her compulsive comedic tic of self-deprecation as a form of complicity in her own humiliation—and renounced it with a climactic roar of defiance. The way she deployed her blazing anger felt groundbreaking, but some performers and fans complained that Nanette had left the category of comedy altogether. When I mention this polarized reaction, Gadsby bristles at what she deems “both sides” framing. “It wasn’t polarized,” she insists. “The only people who hated it are people who are comedy nerds and they’re like the anti-vax movement—a tiny percentage of the population.”
Timing played a major part in her rise to American notoriety. Nanette called out Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK and Roman Polanski at a moment when #MeToo was just picking up steam. “Because of when it landed, there were a lot of men who were really angry that they didn’t get a say in removing Louis CK and including me” in the comedy pantheon, she says, letting out a wheezy laugh. “They’re like: well, I didn’t get a vote!” The show was not written in response to MeToo, though. Gadsby had been performing it on the Australian and British circuits for a year before the Netflix special, inspired by the gay marriage debate in Australia.
Douglas is tonally the opposite of Nanette. “If you’re looking for fresh trauma I’m all out!” she tells the adoring audience. Her main goal was “just fun,” she says, though the special is laced with plenty of Gadsby’s trademark riffs on misogyny, representations of women in art history–and of course, a Louis CK shout out. “I needed it to be a release, personally, but also to escape that mold that I’ve set for myself in Nanette. I wanted it to be silly, because people need to know that there’s nuance to life after trauma.”