Hannah Gadsby: ‘I’m not Taylor Swift – I’ve got grit and I’m not afraid to use it’

Hannah Gadsby is bewildered. “Success has effectively scrambled my brain,” they say, letting out a heady giggle for just a fragment of a second. “The bigger you get, the more melted your brain gets… you can’t actually comprehend it.” It’s understandable – few comedians ever get the kind of traction that their breakthrough special Nanette did in 2018. The Emmy and Peabody-winning show that was filmed for Netflix was a pointed deconstruction of stand-up comedy as an art form, a relatively laugh-light exploration of trauma and marginalisation framed around Gadsby’s impending retirement from comedy. Such was Nanette’s success that this retirement never manifested.

“It’s been a hell of a trip,” they say, speaking over Zoom from an office on the west coast of the US. Gadsby, 46, is genderqueer and uses they/them pronouns; they have a shock of greying hair, shrewd eyes and a face that perennially threatens to furl into a scowl – but never does. “I often compare it to a whitewater rapid,” they continue. “I didn’t go into Nanette with grand plans, or any kind of hopes of some sort of stratospheric career – I was trying to recede.”

In the six years since they very much didn’t recede, Gadsby’s output has been prolific. There have been two more stand-up shows (Douglas and Something Special); an acclaimed autobiography (Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation); and a Netflix showcase spotlighting up-and-coming genderqueer comics (Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda). Somehow, they’ve also found time to star in the fourth season of Netflix’s zeitgeisty teen sex drama Sex Education, curate a much-discussed (but critically polarising) Pablo Picasso-themed exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and, to cap it off, get married (to producer Jenney Shamash, who helped bring Nanette to the off-Broadway stage). Next month, Gadsby will be at the Edinburgh Fringe, performing their newest stand-up special, Woof! – also coming to the London Palladium later this year. A whitewater rapid seems like an apt enough metaphor to me.

And yet, Gadsby does not quite have the air of someone being rag-dolled around by churning water. Instead, they seem… sanguine? Content? Happy, even? As happy as any conscientious person can be in the purgatory that we call modern life, at least. “The ability to be an artist, to focus my life on creating… that’s all I ever wanted,” Gadsby says. For them, the past decade has brought a number of major positive life changes. Nanette brought financial security and creative opportunity; Gadsby’s diagnosis with autism was perhaps even more personally significant. (“Being autistic is like being the only sober person in a room full of drunks,” they once quipped onstage. “...Or the other way around.”) Life as an autistic person can, says Gadsby, “be physically painful for me. It’s less existentially difficult for me now that I understand that I have autism and also I have the [financial] means to protect myself physically from the world.”

Gadsby grew up in small-town Tasmania, and endured, as so many queer and neurodivergent people do, a childhood fraught with imposed prejudices and difficulties. As a student, they studied art history and curatorship – beginning a fascination with visual art that would later be weaponised to mischievous ends in their stand-up, and, for a few years, as a presenter of joke-filled guided art tours for the National Gallery of Victoria. Their artistic predilections came to a head with the 2021 Picasso exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, It’s Pablo-matic, which sought to reframe the artist’s work through the lens of his misogyny. Critics largely hated it: a brutal New York Times takedown wrote that “the ambitions here are at gif level”. ArtsHub, meanwhile, described it as “a victim of its hype”.

Gadsby says that they try to keep their detractors at arm’s length, and reads little of what is said about them online. “Am I gonna read all these criticisms from bitter people, and then talk to these criticisms that my fans don’t have?” they say. “There’s so much going on in the world. You really don’t need to talk about me.”

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Onstage, they speak, and joke, with a sort of knowing, rehearsed authority; there is a particular cadence to a Hannah Gadsby joke. It may be this, combined with the weighty subject matter, that has led some people to read an amount of didacticism into shows such as Nanette. But today, away from the microphone, their clipped Australian patter sounds a good deal softer. They do not give off the vibe of someone desperate to dominate the discourse, to become social media’s “main character”. There seems to be nothing really didactic about them at all.

If anything, ventures such as Gender Agenda suggest an open-mindedness, and a willingness to pass the baton to other, younger voices. “I don’t feel old,” Gadsby says, furrowing their brow a little. “But in the scheme of the world, I’m middle-aged. I grew up in a very different time. I really think the more interesting conversations are going to come from younger people, who have not been able to get their head above the waves like I finally have.

“I just don’t want to be remembered forever,” they add. “Because the lengths people go to be remembered forever are either violent or embarrassing.”

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Netflix seems to run its stand-up empire with a kind of “something for everyone” mentality: comedians such as Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle have, like Gadsby, fronted multiple specials for the streamer in recent years. I mention these two in particular because Gervais and Chappelle’s specials have contained repeated and controversial jokes targeting the trans community; Gadsby has taken aim at them, and other contemporaries, on stage and off. “I actually find it quite uncomfortable with how unwilling comics are to call out their peers,” they say, “and that’s where the rot sets in.”

In taking Netflix’s money, is there not a conflict of interest, I ask? “I was trying to use that conflict to create some sort of conversation,” they reply. “But sadly, I think transphobia is par for the course, at this point. I feel like if you’re trying to push back against violent rhetoric towards a minority group, I think it’s safe to say that Netflix really aren’t on board with that.” It’s a bold claim – but Gadsby isn’t the first to make it. In 2021, Chappelle’s special The Closer prompted a group of Netflix staffers to walk out and stage a 100-strong protest. Since then, Chappelle has continued to release new material on the platform.

Gadsby pauses, and adds, with a kind of wry exasperation: “But, you know, I gave it a go. Ultimately, I wasn’t under any impression that I could shift this needle, but what I could do was provide a little bit of that cash cow to some younger genderqueer performers – and that really is important. It is a career building thing even if it gets lost in the noise. I don’t see Netflix doing a lot to sponsor grassroots development.”

Gadsby is wary, too, of their own fanbase. Even pre-Nanette, they say, “it really was like, I’m just gonna sort out who my audience is. Because even at that stage, I was like, ‘I don’t know who I’m talking to any more.’” In their stand-up, they have (only half-jokingly) described their “core demographic” as being “rich, white, entitled women”. “If you squint, you could include myself as part of that demographic,” they admit. “But that joke is very much directed at my audience, who are [largely] white. You know, if an African American woman would walk in, they’re not going, ‘I feel very comfortable here.’ It’s the white woman that comes into my audience that feels comfortable.”

Gadsby is keen to avoid conflating the specific struggles of racial discrimination with their own experiences as the victim of gendered bigotry; in a follow-up email sent to me after our interview, they emphasise this point. But there is nonetheless a divide between Gadsby’s audience and themself, and they are keen to delineate the difference. Just because chunks of their fanbase may embody or expect a certain brand of safe, straight-palatable feminism, doesn’t mean Gadsby does. “Some of the audience that Nanette resonated with… I want to remind them that I’m not Barbie. I’m not Taylor Swift. I’ve got grit and I’m not afraid to use it,” Gadsby says.

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Their new stand-up set Woof! is described in its billing as a show about “learning how to process the world, with all its catastrophes and hypocrisies, from a new perspective”. Fans can surely expect it to touch on some familiar topics – gender, sexuality, Gadsby’s experience of the world as an autistic person – but it is also, they say, about their attempt to “grapple” with the fallout from Nanette. “I’m gonna get cancelled by feminists,” they joke in the set. “I don’t think there’s anything more feminist than getting cancelled by feminists.”

Both in Gadsby’s comedy and within the ambit of this conversation, it’s difficult to escape the reverberations of Nanette. I ask gingerly about the backlash to the special, the rip-tidal contrarianism that tends to accompany any work of performance as lauded as Gadsby’s breakthrough. “I’ve lost interest in it because it’s disingenuous,” they respond. “I think some people are rocking [back] on that original opinion of Nanette,and, well, that was seven years ago! I’ve moved on. I’ve moved on a lot – and so has comedy.

“But, you know, if they’re still sad about what Nanette was,” Gadsby adds, “it’s like, check out the backlash. We’re not living in a post-Nanette world any more. I’ve always traditionally found criticism quite helpful. But that was when I was beginning my career – the media landscape was very different. It’s just noise now. It’s too much noise.”

Some of the criticisms of Nanette were plainly and simply rooted in bigotry – a reactionary aversion to a person who looked and spoke like Gadsby finding success and visibility. But Nanette too was also a spiky and deliberate conversation starter, with a thesis that was confrontational by design. It was a special that asked whether the self-deprecation of comedy as a form is inherently alienating for a queer performer – interrogating who, at the end of the day, the joke was really on. “It made the splash that everyone dreams of doing,” Gadsby says. “But I get bored by the conversation around it.

“And of course I like to stir the pot.” They smile, archly. “But I think it’s interesting how easily stirred the pot is, you know?”

Hannah Gadsby will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival from 18-25 August. Then, at London’s Palladium from 4-7 November