Nanettes Hannah Gadsby Is Serious About Quitting Comedy

Where is Tasmania? Its a question comedian Hannah Gadsby gets a lot, so Ill let her explain: this chilly, windswept island, the size of West Virginia but with a quarter of the population, can be found “hanging out just off the arse end of Australia.” If you want to know what its like down there, just look at the place names: “Savage River. Detention River. Cape Grim. Dismal Swamp,” she told me recently over pastries in SoHo. All of these are real, by the way. “I think that paints a picture,” she said, deadpan.

In late June, Gadsbys stand-up special Nanette debuted on Netflix, and it has quickly generated the sort of gabby, breathless social-media recommendations that TV executives pray for. After 10 years of writing and touring, this success has been a slightly surreal experience—especially since Nanette is about why Gadsby is quitting comedy.

“Im living someone elses dream,” Gadsby said, sounding a bit dazed. “Cracking America just seemed too hard.”

To clarify, by “too hard,” Gadsby actually meant “too much effort.” Then again, she used to think the same thing about the Edinburgh Fringe, where Nanette won best comedy show in 2017. (It won the same prize at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.) She brought Nanette to New York with the idea that her so-called little show would run for four weeks and sell a few tickets. That was four months ago.

“And its just kept going,” she said. “And I think I could still keep going. But I will not. I have to stop.”

Why? Thats the substance of Nanette. Much of the shows brilliance lies within its distinctly un-funny bits. To start with, Tasmania decriminalized homosexuality only in 1997. She is from the rural northwest—as she put it, “the Tasmania of Tasmania,” where the community is so close she can remember meeting her first stranger, but she said 70 percent of the people around her thought that homosexuality was wrong.

In Nanette, Gadsby says shes gender nonconforming enough to create tension whenever she enters a room. So she developed a sense of humor as a way to diffuse it, one that hinged mostly on self-deprecation.

“When you boil a joke down to its very bare essentials,” Gadsby says to her audience, “it simply needs two things: a setup and a punch line. . . . What a joke is in this situation is a question Ive artificially inseminated with tension. I do that. And its what I keep doing. I make you tense. And then I make you laugh. Over and over again. This is an abusive relationship!” Cue laughter.

She told a joke about waiting at the bus stop at age 17. Gadsby was talking to a girl whose boyfriend got violently jealous. If she werent a woman, he said, he would beat the shit out of her—tension—but then generously, he conceded he wouldnt, because he didnt “hit women.”

“What a guy!” Gadsby marveled.

What changed her approach to comedy, after a decade of traditional stand-up and appearances on TV series like Please Like Me, was the moment Gadsby realized that some things arent worth joking about. “I made a lot of people laugh with that story,” she said quietly, to a transfixed hush from a sold-out crowd. ”[But] Im not able to tell that story as it happened, as I need to tell it. And you know what? You need to hear it.

“The part of the story where that young man came back? The penny had dropped. He saw me for who I was before I knew who I was. And he said, Oh no, I get it. Youre one of them lady faggots. And Im allowed to beat the shit out of you. And he did. He beat the living shit out of me. And nobody stopped him! We drew a crowd! And nobody helped me! I was seventeen.”

The crowd was immobilized. Around me, people were wiping their faces and sniffling audibly.

“Do you understand,” she said, “what self-deprecation means when it comes from someone who exists, and always has done, in the margins? It isnt humility. Its humiliation. . . . I make fun of myself in order to make other people feel more comfortable with my difference. And I decided I dont want to do that anymore. Not to myself or anybody who may identify with me.”

At this, a row of audience members erupted in applause. Gadsby looked at the floor. “So with that decision comes that response,” she said drily.

Even if it means quitting comedy, Gadsby is committed to shunning jokes that profit from her own pain. She told me she got this idea after seeing a bunch of (male) comedians use Amy Winehouse as a punch line in the documentary Amy. That got her thinking about other “easy, reliable punch lines”—like Monica Lewinsky.

“Perhaps if comedians had done their job properly and made fun of the man who abused his power,” she told the theater, “then perhaps we might have a middle-aged woman with an appropriate amount of experience in the White House—instead of, as we do, a man who openly admitted to sexually assaulting vulnerable young women because he could!” She sounded furious.

As it turned out, Lewinsky was actually in the audience the night I saw the show. Gadsby learned this shortly before she went onstage.

“I was a bit scared, because shes a real, actual human being,” Gadsby told me, “[and] I was using her name in the sense that shes a cultural object.” But afterward, Lewinsky came backstage and the two of them had “a little moment,” as Gadsby put it. Gadsby said that both she and Lewinsky are trying to shift prevailing attitudes around privilege and power. “I think we have a moral obligation to take privilege off people and spread it around,” Gadsby said.

Not so long ago, Gadsby was planning to move back to Tasmania and get a job at her brothers produce shop. Now, shes reconsidering somewhat—”I think Ive still got . . . Im not ready to be a hermit,” she explained—although shes still wary of doing anything “too hard.” For example, when I asked what she was doing after our interview, Gadsby told me she was “taking meetings,” in a tone that practically drew quotation marks in the air.

“Its my first time in America,” she said. “They love a chat. Ive picked up on that very quickly. And who am I to deny them that . . .” She paused, groping for the appropriate word, and then giggled, “treat.”

Shes started working on a book called Ten Steps to Nanette, but shes had to put it aside due to the emotional demands of the show, which she describes as a beast. She did say shell likely always tell stories, and continue “being reasonably funny about it”—but not at her own expense. Never again.

“Im learning how this whole thing works,” she said. “Im thinking about what I want to do. Im too old—not too old, but Im tired—to put a lot of energy into something I dont really want to do. And I am genuine when I say I can walk away.”

Get Vanity Fairs HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Full ScreenPhotos:12 Stars Who Got Their Start at the U.C.B. Theatre

Amy Poehler

There would be no Upright Citizens Brigade without Poehler, who co-founded the comedy troupe with seven other performers in Chicago in 1990. A pared-down version of the group would eventually open their own theater in New York in 1999, giving a platform to thousands of up-and-comers in the years since.Photo: By Colleen Hayes/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images.

Matt Walsh

The Veep star is another original U.C.B. member: “We didnt really have a plan, truthfully,” he told Uproxx of the troupes early days in New York. “We just started teaching classes and it evolved into a school.”Photo: By Colleen Hayes/HBO.

Donald Glover

As an N.Y.U. student, the future Atlanta auteur studied at the U.C.B. Theatre. His work paid off; his senior year, he was hired to write for a new NBC series called 30 Rock.Photo: By Guy DAlema/FX.

Kate McKinnon

The S.N.L. standout spent enough time at the U.C.B. Theatre in her early days to stage three solo shows; she was also a member of sketch teams called High Treason, Beneath Gristedes, Tremendous Machine, and Gramps.Photo: By Will Heath/NBC.

Aubrey Plaza

Plaza elected to attend N.Y.U. in part so she would have easy access to U.C.B. classes; before long, she scored her breakout role on Parks and Recreation, co-starring with U.C.B. royalty Amy Poehler.Photo: By Tyler Golden/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images.

Nick Kroll

Kroll Show characters like Fabrice Fabrice have their origins in Krolls U.C.B. shows: “We were walking around talking about his name and I think we saw some Febreze, and then it became Fabrice,” he told the A.V. Club in 2014.Photo: By Ron Batzforff/Comedy Central/Everett Collection.

Ed Helms

The future star of The Office and The Hangover was instantly pulled in by the U.C.B. Theatre: “They had the thing that drew me to comedy in the first place: that energy when somebodys putting it all out there, acting like a massive jackass, with no reservations. It was something that scared the shit out of me, and therefore I had to try it,” he told New York.Photo: By Frank Masi/Warner Bros./Everett Collection.PreviousNext