The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Comedian Hannah Gadsby Goes Big Time, and Renounces Comedy

Episode Date: June 19, 2018

Hannah Gadsby is a headlining comedian in Australia, a regular at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and is about to become a very big deal in America with a special on Netflix called “Nanette.”  It���s a full-length comedy show, and at the same time, a carefully structured critique of stand-up comedy. “Nanette” reflects her experiences as an overweight woman, a lesbian, a native of Tasmania, and an adult diagnosed with autism, and addresses subjects as serious as Gadsby’s sexual assault..  She tells The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum that comedy contains a kind of violence, and she might be done with it.  Plus: Amanda Petrusich picks three outdoor music festivals worth sweating for. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

in the conversation with someone, when they have that revelation, like, you're free to make sure. That maybe looking at this case, it could be an interesting process. Okay. From one world trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Ramon.

Coachella. Backstage at Wallapalooza, Pitchfork Music Festival. Summer means, among other things, outdoor music festivals all across the country by the hundreds in every genre you could possibly name. Where thousands of mostly young people pack their sweaty selves onto huge fields to listen to band after band after band and all the while trying to avoid heat stroke. Keeping up on top of the summer festivals is a job for music critic Amanda Petrusich and better her than me. You know what's nice at a concert? A chair.

A nice chair. I like that. Like a freshly mixed martini. I like, yeah. Well, even a cold beer would be just, just a thing. For me, it's the bathrooms. It's the porta-potties, like the, you know, plastic kind of coffin effect. And also the kind of sweatbox aspect mixing well.

It's just a great combination. I don't know why people aren't inviting us to their festivals because we're a great time. Now, Amanda, despite all this propaganda from me, you've come to this. tell us about some great festivals that summer. If anyone is still listening. Where and when and how? My first pick is called Pickathon, and it is a festival that's held every summer in Happy Valley, Oregon, just outside of Portland. The UK independent newspaper has called it the most hipster event on the planet.

I'm so there. The stages kind of double as art installations. Every attendee gets one plate and one cup that you reuse for the entire weekend. So this is not Beyonce topping the bill. No, I mean, one of the cool things, or another cool thing I should say about Pickathon is that most of these festival, the big summer festival lineups, they're all the same. You know, it's like the same sort of big money-making acts. Pickathon is great in that I think the curation is a little more idiosyncratic. It's a roots music festival, so they tend to be sort of, you know, folksier bands or bands with whom you can sort of have a real kind of intimate connection.

It's a little bit less spectacle and maybe a little smaller, even though the festival itself is pretty big. It sounds fun. Yeah, I hope so. But there are two artists playing this year that I'm super excited about, both of whom are pick-a-thon veterans. And the first is a folk band from Toronto called The Weather Station. So why don't we listen to it a little bit? There was a time you put your hand on the small of my back.

I was surprised that you touched me like that. But there in your hand was occurring of life I could hardly stand. The state is too that I didn't imagine. We thought it ought to make some joke of it It was strange I could feel so same So flying you're out We were listening to Tamara Lindemann singing

She was a television star in Canada Prior to kind of dedicating herself to music full-time But I like that her voice is sort of delicate, it's vulnerable But she has a real edge to her too And her lyrics, I think, can be They're really sort of sharply observed and interesting Who else is playing in Oregon? The second is a,

a band of Tuareg musicians from Mali called Tanariwen. It's really sort of mesmeric and beautiful. And for me, they're the kind of band that you actually want to hear outside under the stars with a zillion other people around. Okay, so we've left to Oregon. Where are we going now? My second pick will surely get me accused of collusion. And my accusers will be right,

because I've written for pitchfork for many years. And my second pick is the pitchfork music festival. That's fair enough. which is in Grant Park in Chicago in July. But I will say I think the lineup this year is extraordinary. And in particular, I'm incredibly excited about a young singer and songwriter from West London named Nillifur Yanya. She's released three EPs, has yet to release her debut record. But I think she makes this sort of nonchalant but really deeply felt guitar pop that's sort of heavy and beautiful.

and she's only playing a handful of U.S. States this summer. She's opening for Fleet Foxes. The Pitchfork Music Festival is one of them. Pitchfork also has Lauren Hill and Shaka Khan on Sunday night, so it's going to be, I think, a pretty epic weekend. I am afraid my last pick is going to scare you off because it's a little new-agey, and I'm afraid you're going to make fun of me.

Wyndham Hill? A bit, yes. Okay. It is. But I promise you no crystals, no tinctures, no scarves. My third pick is a concert series called Sonic Seasonal, which takes place at the Chestnut Hill Quaker Meeting House in Philadelphia, which is also the home to a James Terrell sky space. So there is a lovely light insulation in this space. And they book a different artist for every season of the year. and the summer booking is a harpist named Mary Latimore. Just released her fourth record. I'm there. So when Joanna Newsom brought the harp back into pop music,

I was so dubious and she's a kind of genius. So bring it up. I think that you will dig what Mary's doing too. It's a harp. But she's, you know, she does some kind of strange and difficult and provocative things with it. It's not just all sort of, you know, hotel lobby cocktail reception. And I think in this space, it will be really, really beautiful.

Amanda, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Staff writer Amanda Petrusich, recommending Sonic Seasonal in Philadelphia, the Pitchfork Festival in Chicago, and Pickathon in Oregon. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. The comedian Hannah Gadsby is very big in Australia. She's a headliner at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, and she's a regular

at the International Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Gatsby is about to become a very big deal in America with a special on Netflix called Nanette. Nanette is a full-length comedy show and at the same time

a critique of stand-up comedy that's serious and even profound. The New Yorker's Emily Newsbaum went to see Nanette, performed in New York, and she says that Gatsby had her audience laughing and crying

and sometimes dead silent. I first saw Hannah Gadsby in a fantastic Australian television show called Please Like Me. In it, she played a depressed but intensely charming young woman named Hannah, a character who was based a little bit on her and a little bit on Hannah's work as a stand-up comedian. She's developed a new hour-long stand-up show pretty much every year. Hannah's latest show is something very different. It's a masterful critique of stand-up comedy, and it's a strikingly relevant presentation. and a challenging one for audiences in the age of Me Too. It's also hilarious, and it might make you cry.

I've built a career out of humiliating myself. I'm putting myself down in order to seek permission to speak, to take up space in the world. And I have decided I don't want to do that anymore. I will not do that anymore. Not to myself. Oh, thank you. I mean, I mean, I'm not starting a rally.

I'll finish the show as a comedy. But thank you. is very carefully structured, doing different things to the audience at different points, soothing them, making them tense, engaging them, shocking them. There are stories that weave through the show. They start out as jokes, and Gadsby gradually unfolds them like a paper fortune teller to reveal that they aren't jokes at all. They're very serious stories about prejudice, power, and assault, but they're never polemical or simply pedantic. They have complicated, unsettling things to say about the kinds of relationships that people have with one another.

Hannah told me that early on in her career, her outsider status in many different ways helped her to be funny. I'm a very difficult human to categorize. Like, I'm a larger woman, I'm from Tasmania, which is the small state in Australia, and I'm a lesbian. And these come with stereotypes that I subvert. Tasmanians are supposed to be stupid, but I'm quite cerebral, so I don't play to that. And then also with my being over a weight, I don't, I'm not jolly.

I don't make fun of my weight. And then lesbian, which means very angry. This is when I started particularly. I mean, of course, that's opened up a lot more. And I'm quite a gentle, sensitive. So that really, you know, helped me early in my career because, you know, when you disrupt, that's instant tension. So that's actually handy.

But as my career evolved, it became a real block. Right. And ultimately, what this show is, and I don't say it in the show at all. I don't make any reference to it at all, but essentially this show is about having autism and a late diagnosis. And so instead of saying, this is what I have, I decided to show what this brain can do, which is a real clear acknowledgement of how emotion works and how I feel it. It's really fascinating because I actually was thinking that that is one of the most powerful things about the show is that I've seen cerebral comedy shows and I've seen emotive ones and it is both a cerebral and a deeply emotional show. And that combination is a very potent thing.

And one of the things that's just beautiful in the show is that you explain the limits of stand-up while you're doing stand-up. And so you do this kind of seductive magician revealing their trick thing. so you make the audience self-conscious of the power that goes back and forth. So we're going to play just a little clip of a section of the show in which you talk about how comedy works, how jokes work. Let me tell you what a joke is. If I boil it down to its absolute bare components, a joke simply needs two things, a setup and a punchline.

It's all it needs. And it works in the same way as a question and answer. You ask a question, the anticipation is the tension, and the answer diffuses the tension. But with a joke, the answer is a surprise. So you laugh. So I wasn't expecting that. There you go, lesson over.

It's an easy job. I'll be replaced. No, everybody will miss me. But what a joke is in this situation is a question that I've just artificially inseminated with tension. And that's all I do. Like, I manipulate it. Like, I make you tense, then I make you laugh over and over again.

And you're like, oh, thank you. I was feeling a bit tense. But fucking hell, guys. I'm making you tense over and over again. This is an abusive relationship. I love that part because it's a very deep insight, but it also has this dirty joke in it. Your bigger point that you're making, though, is that there's something harmful about jokes, and there's something harmful specifically about stopping at the punchline, like the perpetual stopping at the punchline.

Can you describe a bit what you think that harm is? It's the harm of the joke is the only reason to speak. The point is only to make people laugh. And that troubled me after a while. Because I've always told stories, and that whole idea that laughter is the best medicine is not what I believe in. I believe laughter is the honey that sweetens the medicine story, really.

It allows you to listen to the story. Yeah. Here you're talking about storytelling as a psychological tool, one we use to understand our own experiences by turning them into narratives. and it's about also the live experience because stand-up comedy has the potential to be such an amazing cultural gift

because it is one of the rare occasions where a group of strangers get to sit in a room sharing an experience and I think that is a very potent human thing to have but I really think I really am passionately concerned that story gets downplayed and dismissed. Essentially what art is, any art,

it's not special, it's story. And stories are brilliant and they're wonderful and they're so important. But the story really does, in the traditional sense, need three parts, a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the end, the third part, is so important. And that is what elevates you. That's where catharsis lives.

That's where hindsight sits. That's where you get to look back through a narrative with a perspective, wisdom and experience of someone other than yourself. Comedy doesn't do that. We stop short. Set up punchline, beginning, middle. There it sits. And it's a very good reason it's called a punchline is because it deals with tension, hence it feeds trauma. We need tension in the room in order to get a laugh.

But then we don't sort it out after. We just leave it there. This is like all these comedians going up and down the country, triggering people and getting all confused. It was like, yeah, because you just keep saying the same thing and it hurts. So there's an ongoing debate about what is not an acceptable joke. For instance, is a joke about rape ever actually funny? Is it okay to make a genocide gag? Chris Rock has this idea that if people laugh, it means it's funny.

Like, you disagree with that, I would assume. I do. Yeah. I've been in the audiences and I've laughed at horrific things. I've also stood side of stage while comedians are doing material. I find absolutely horrific. making people believe violence against women is funny. And I hear audiences laughing.

And I don't think that they would want to. You know, you can make anyone laugh if you make them tense enough because they want to get rid of the tension. So about 20 minutes into Nanette, the show shifts. And you tell personal stories on stage. A lot of it has to do with painful and traumatic personal experiences. I was wondering how it felt on stage for you when you were first forming the show

to have people crying or silent. Like, you're a person who's used to getting laughs. Like, what was that like for you as a performer? Strutely, what I was doing there is I was using one of the best tools in a particularly longer form comedy show and that's a callback. And it works on the premise of a shared joke

in comedy. Often I do, that's what I do. Like I, you know, work through an hour's stand-up and eventually we have shared jokes. And I love that. They make an average joke, brilliant. In this show, I subverted that. I used a call back to drop them into a huge hole and not give them the laugh.

So to go against my instinct was really incredibly hard. To not break the tension, real palpable silences in the show. And my instinct is a comic is to make people feel better and make them off. So that was difficult in the first. And also I was getting really horrific heckles in the first. I was wondering, did people heckle you? Yeah, because now there's no room. because it's really tight now.

But when I first was doing it, there was a lot of room, the structure was different. And, you know, it was always guys, and always after I just told my audience that I'd been sexually assaulted, always at that point. That's amazing to me. And so then I'd get men's playing from the audience. I have to say, having seen the show,

which is a very, like, and you really do have control, over the audience, like you sort of critique the control back and forth. So people would shout cruel, insulting things to you? So this has evolved. This control has evolved pretty much out of that because I'm like, well, I don't want this to happen. I can't keep doing this show if this is going to happen. So I learned from that, but it was really devastating because when I do that, when I am genuinely vulnerable and it is violence. It felt like violence to get heckled at those moments. But I think I really learned from that. like, gosh, that is violence.

And that's what comedy promotes. And so it really drove the show toward a more technical show because I wanted to show people what that is, that violence and what it feels like. Well, you're obviously an extremely technically a great stand-up comic. Are there specific skills that you've picked up from doing this different kind of show? No, this is.

a showcase almost. What's interesting about the show is I'm high status. I've never been that in a show. But I discovered that voice doing, I had to do a spin-off at some festivals where I do comedy art lectures. I've done one on the Virgin Mary, the one on the nude and modern-off. Just to clarify, you have an art history background. Yes, yes. Sorry. And when I did those shows, I discovered I had more authority. I could talk about interesting things and there wasn't that resistance going, where's my laugh, which you get in comedy? So that's, this is the first comedy show that I've played higher status and authoritative. Yeah, whereas before I would just be, you know. This is actually a great part for us to play this other clip that is actually

partially about art and partially about an incredibly timely subject, sexual trauma, misogyny, art, and the Me Too movement. Honestly, I can draw a straight line from Pablo Picasso to Donald Trump by way of Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Louis C.K., Bill Cosby, they are all cut from the same fucking clock. And I'm sick of it. These men control our stories. They control our stories, yet they have a diminishing connection to their own humanity. What the fuck are we doing?

Hindsight is a gift. Unwrap it. Like, I keep getting told, just separate the man from the art. You've got to separate the man from the art. All right, grow up, calm down. Don't get emotional. It's art. You've got to separate the man from the art. How about I don't? I will not separate the man from the art. And even if I did, the shit sticks. See, I got to say, I loved this part of the show. It was also the part that, because I'm an arts critic, was the most challenging to me because it is the thing that I have been wrestling so much in the people who've influenced me, the people that I've written about. I have my own ambivalent relationship. Are there artists that are basically like shitty guys?

guys who've done bad things that are important influences on you? What do you do with that stuff once you don't separate it? I believe, you know, art is important. I don't believe artists are important as individuals. My favorite comedians are being Bill Cosby, always. He's funny. I like his rhythm. I like what he talked about. But I found it very easy to let go of him. Very easy. I don't feel easy listening to his comedy anymore, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't influence me. But I let go of the man. That makes a lot of sense.

Has telling your own story every night changed how you see your story? Yes. I am reliving trauma every night, and I'm not a trained performer, so I don't know how to do that protecting myself. But because it's such a vulnerable show I don't know what I've done to myself with this show. Like I've spoken to psychiatrists and people who, you know, research trauma,

and they don't know what I've done with this show, reliving trauma over and over again. There's a fair chance I've done some neurological rewiring. And that's a part of a longer game in my comedy career anyway. Doing comedy and particularly the longer form, hour-long shows, has meant that I've interrogated my own story. I needed to find a better, you know, hindsight. You can't change what's happened. You can't repress what's happened,

but you can find a more constructive hindsight. But also the added bonus is what I felt is that I'm more connected to the world than I've ever been because my idiosyncratic story, I thought, was going to seal me off into the margins. But so many different types of people have connected into different parts that show that it's actually been very, constructive in that, in a broader sense. And that's what doing this show is done for me. Absolutely. Comedian Hannah Gadsby talking with the New Yorker's Emily Newsbaum. Gatsby's show Nanette

premieres on Netflix this week. I'm David Remnick and that's it for today. Thanks for being with us. And if you've enjoyed the show, I just want to remind you you can subscribe to the podcast and catch up on anything you missed. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed by Meryl Garvis of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon, Jaldaq, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, Mithelie Rowe, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Michelle Moses, Emily Mann, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.