“Personally, I get so much out of your writing,” she tells her, “because I need your perspective. Gadsby, a fan of Gay’s work, arrives brimming with sarcastic, silly wisecracks.
In the background, a large TV is playing a crime drama on mute. They sit down to talk at Gay’s new house, which is so box-fresh you can still smell the paint. Gay has just moved to the city permanently, after a few years of shuttling back and forth between LA and Indiana, where she was, until recently, an associate professor of English at Purdue University. They met for the first time a few weeks ago, at a cultural event in Los Angeles, where Gadsby has been living. You moved me and have really made me think about humor, the self, self-deprecation and the uses of anger. The writer and critic Roxane Gay, whose collection of essays Bad Feminist and memoir Hunger were critically praised bestsellers, covering everything from her past as a competitive Scrabble player to overeating, and her experiences of rape, tweeted Gadsby when her set first screened: “Nanette is simply remarkable. There was one in the New York Times – three pages. “With this whole Nanette business, he started going, ‘God, the articles are getting a bit long now. Her father, she says, has always collected anything written about her, but his task is becoming more and more demanding. Nanette’s second life turned Gadsby from a working comic into a global star, lauded for her candour and insight by everyone from Ellen Page to Monica Lewinsky.
What begins as an apparently mainstream routine segues into a story about something troubling that happened to Gadsby as a young woman, told first one way – and then, brutally, another it’s at once a deconstruction of the art form (her work has been billed as “anti-comedy”), and a critique of her audience – angry, smart, radical. This supposed swansong of a set had previously stunned audiences from Melbourne to Edinburgh, with its devastating twists on who and what jokes are for, and how suffering and trauma are turned into material. I n June, the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby’s standup show Nanette was released on Netflix.