Seriously, We Need to Talk About Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Nanette’

Nanette, the Netflix special from Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, landed on the streaming service well over a month ago. For that reason, it should be the last thing WIRED is doing a piece on. However, in the six weeks since the special first dropped, the conversation around it has only increased—and by now, the special has established itself as a sleeper phenomenon. Dealing openly with the sexism, homophobia, and assaults Gadsby has dealt with in her own life, Nanette quickly became the title most frequently preceded by “Have you seen…” during the typically quiet months of June and July. And in the process, it completely upended what a comedy special could be in the process.

Which means we needed to talk about it, too. Below we gathered writers and editors Angela Watercutter, Jason Kehe, Alexis Sobel Fitts, and Peter Rubin for a roundtable discussion about Nanette and what, exactly, made it such an unexpected success.

Angela Watercutter, Senior Associate Editor: Strictly speaking, I may very well be Hannah Gadsby’s target demo: I’m a woman with a fondness for blazers and short hair and I like comedy. But that’s not why I watched Nanette the weekend it came out. At least not initially. I put it on because a friend of mine had sent me a clip of the part of the special where Gadsby relates a run-in with a mansplainer telling her she shouldn’t take antidepressants because she’s an artist and “if Vincent Van Gogh had taken medication, we wouldn’t have The Sunflowers.” (Yes, the part where she says “I tore that man a college-debt-sized new asshole.”) The thinkpieces hadn’t started rolling in yet, so I wasn’t expecting the twist. (If you don’t know what I mean by “the twist” stop reading now, go watch Nanette, and come back.) By the time I’d finished, my heart was on the floor. Everything she was saying—about art, about the tools of comedy, about the strength of broken people who rebuild themselves—hit like a locomotive.

Like many of you, I’m sure, that viewing led to lots of conversations about Gadsby’s special (as well multiple repeat viewings). I heard lots of feedback, lots of opinions; most of those came down to how mind-blowing and revolutionary Nanette was. The reasons people offered for why it is so vital are almost as varied as the people I talked to about it. But I think what struck me most was that I’d never heard anyone address the psychological layers of self-deprecating humor in a comedy show. Watching it, I realized I’d often relied on the same tricks of tension-breaking Gadsby does/did—though, admittedly, not as well—and hadn’t really thought about the implications. That bit has lingered in my brain for a while, and I don’t think it’ll ever leave.

Jason Kehe, Senior Associate Editor: Angela, you happened to be at our San Francisco office the day after I watched Nanette, and thank god, because I had to talk to you about it. Pretty sure I said something to the effect of: “NA. freaking. NETTE.” Like you, I was stunned, overwhelmed, floored. But I gotta ask: Does this count as comedy? Or stand-up? At least two friends of mine kept calling it a “speech,” which feels belittling. Others seem to prefer “one-woman show.” That’s closer, maybe (though—do we ever say “one-man show”?), but I still maintain it’s a stand-up comedy special. In a sense it had to be called that, because the whole point is that, midway through, she completely subverts what that means. The show worked for me in many ways, but the main one might be as a kind of meta self-interrogatory anti-comedy. Anyway, why this strenuous effort to categorize, name, label? My mental image is of the tongue-tied masses being like: GERP WHAT IS THIS?!

Alexis Sobel Fitts, Senior Editor: Oh, how little I want to slot in as resident buzzkill, and the genre-and-culture-bending comedy set of a masculine-of-center lesbian is not the mountain I intended to die on. And yet, here we are.

Look, from a structural perspective, I won’t deny that Hannah Gadsby’s performance is brilliant: The way she quietly built and broke different interlocking threads could (and should) be studied by grad students, dissected and mapped and explained as a masterclass on narrative. What I question is the hype. I’m not clear what makes her set so genre-breaking. Comedy is built to question its own existence, to be weird, to vary from form, to offer something closer to social commentary than … well, humor. Think back to a period when Louis C.K. was still comedian god, and remember that his entire live show revolved around unmooring the closing scene of the Grapes of Wrath. It’s not just white guys in the #MeToo set who get to do this: Tig Notaro, Wanda Sykes, Joan Rivers have offered up intimate performances that grapple with the darkest parts of society, that engage and enrage and place blame on the audience, that do much more than setting up jokes.

What made Gadsby’s special special, in my opinion, is the diversity of its audience. Louis C.K. might get to spew his weirdness into packed auditoriums, but when queer, female comedians tackle identity in a set, they’re usually speaking to a limited, like-minded room. Because Netflix had Nanette up on its homepage and the press covered it in a unified push, the resulting network effect transformed it from a television program into a can’t-miss cultural event. For example, I watched the show with my husband—a lovely, well read, open-minded, feminist-advocate … who is also still, a straight, white man. He was overwhelmed by Nanette, he wanted to send it to all of his friends, and talk about it ad nauseam. He also wasn’t used to bearing such close witness to the struggles of a queer woman within the patriarchy. “I know stuff like this happens,” he told me at one point, “but I’m not used to hearing it like this.”