Art, Gadsby makes clear-from painting to comedy-does not liberate everyone equally. It can replicate the same privileges and exclusions as the culture in which it was made.
I truly hope Hannah Gadsby doesn't quit comedy. The obvious irony of Nanette is that her finale has given her that push into mainstream attention and near-universal critical adoration.
Hannah Gadsby's Nanette is the mic drop to end all mic drops-a cross between comedy special and one-woman show that's actually a 69-minute Dear John letter to the entire enterprise of stand-up.
In Nanette, Gadsby strains against the impulse to end every joke with a punchline. To diffuse the tension as such would be a cop-out. She wants the audience to sit with it...powerful, uncomfortable, and searingly angry.
Nanette is the kind of work that leaves you shaken. Not because it's really funny (it really is), or because it's equally heartbreaking, but because it finds a fusion of those two modes that's incandescent.
It is an extremely angry hour, an extremely cathartic one and an extremely necessary one. An art form cannot thrive if it refuses to look itself in the face and question its own necessity.
In Nanette we witness the shock of the new, a voice that dares to speak to this frustrating and often hideous cultural moment, a comedian willing to drop the act. I would call Gadsby a genius, but she would likely push back against that term.
