The power of painful stories in Hannah Gadsby’s… | Little White Lies

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The pow­er of painful sto­ries in Han­nah Gadsby’s Nanette

14 Jul 2018

Words by Hannah Strong

A person with glasses and short hair speaking into a microphone on stage in a dimly lit environment.
A person with glasses and short hair speaking into a microphone on stage in a dimly lit environment.
In her new Net­flix spe­cial, the Aus­tralian com­ic refus­es to play by the rules of stand-up comedy.

Women grow up afraid. From the sec­ond we’re old enough to under­stand the out­side world, we’re taught that it wants to harm us. We’re taught to not dress too provoca­tive­ly (or too con­ser­v­a­tive­ly, or too mas­cu­line­ly) or to say any­thing that might make a man want to hurt us. We’re taught to bow our heads and behave.

Every woman has a sto­ry about this fear – about curl­ing her keys in her fist as she walks home alone at night, about wor­ry­ing about the length of her skirt or wor­ry­ing that she doesn’t want to wear a skirt and this makes her incor­rect­ly female, about being called frigid’ or dyke’ because she doesn’t want to have sex. For cen­turies it’s been this way – even in the wake of #MeToo, the light at the end of the tun­nel some­times still seems far away.

Aus­tralian come­di­an Han­nah Gads­by is tired of being afraid. She’s tired of being angry too. In Nanette, she uses the famil­iar for­mat of a Net­flix com­e­dy spe­cial to tell her pow­er­ful sto­ry, and to remind women every­where that they have a sto­ry too.

The star­tling thing about Nanette is that the first half is fair­ly unre­mark­able. Gads­by – who is open­ly gay – talks about grow­ing up in a small, close-mind­ed com­mu­ni­ty in mid-’90s Tas­ma­nia, where her sex­u­al­i­ty and appear­ance marked her as dif­fer­ent. Describ­ing the sen­ti­ment as, Gays, why don’t you just pack up your AIDS in a suit­case, and fuck off to Mar­di Gras,” Gads­by reveals to her audi­ence that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty was a crime in Tas­ma­nia until 1997. Not long enough ago.” The jokes are fun­ny though not par­tic­u­lar­ly ground­break­ing – a sort of per­func­to­ry look at being a queer woman, sani­tised for a pre­dom­i­nant­ly straight audience.

Around the 30-minute mark, Gads­by begins to talk about the cru­cial com­po­nents of her com­e­dy: ten­sion and release. By mak­ing jokes about top­ics which the audi­ence might find uncom­fort­able – such as her sex­u­al­i­ty and the pain she has suf­fered as a result of it, be it through her own inter­nal­i­sa­tion of rhetoric around homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, or the reac­tion of oth­ers two her – she cre­ates ten­sion among the audi­ence. I make you all tense and then I make you laugh, and you’re like, Thanks for that. I was feel­ing a bit tense’.”

She asks, Do you know why I’m such a fun­ny fuck­er? It’s because I’ve been learn­ing the art of ten­sion dif­fu­sion since I was a chil­dren [sic]. Back then it wasn’t a job, it wasn’t even a hob­by. It was a sur­vival tac­tic. I didn’t have to invent the ten­sion – I was the ten­sion. And I’m tired of ten­sion. Ten­sion is mak­ing me sick. It is time I stopped com­e­dy.” It’s in this moment that Gads­by trans­forms her com­e­dy spe­cial into a dif­fer­ent animal.

Speak­ing about her Art His­to­ry degree (“My CV is pret­ty much a cock and balls drawn under a fax num­ber”), she describes how women have his­tor­i­cal­ly been seen as objects, worth some­thing only in rela­tion to men – but more cru­cial­ly, her dis­il­lu­sion­ment with how com­e­dy deals with the real world. Do you know who used to be an easy punch­line? Mon­i­ca Lewin­sky. Maybe if come­di­ans had done their job prop­er­ly, and made fun of the man who abused his pow­er, then per­haps we might have had a mid­dle-aged woman in the White House with an appro­pri­ate amount of expe­ri­ence instead of, as we do, a man who open­ly admit­ted to sex­u­al­ly assault­ing vul­ner­a­ble young women because he could.”

A person speaking into a microphone, wearing glasses and a dark jacket on a dimly lit stage.

Stand-up com­e­dy has always exist­ed to con­front the worst things about human­i­ty, from Dick Gre­go­ry on racism to Ali Wong’s recent con­fronta­tion of misog­y­ny ear­ly this year in Baby Cobra. In 2016, The Atlantic sug­gest­ed that, The best jokes take some­thing awful and make it sil­ly. Go pure­ly light-heart­ed and you risk being tooth­less. Too edgy, and […] you’ll make peo­ple uncom­fort­able.” But Gads­by is tired of cen­sor­ing her own pain for the sake of mak­ing audi­ences feel com­fort­able. Nanette is a tes­ta­ment to this. It’s time to make audi­ences feel uncom­fort­able in order to wake them up.

When Gads­by calls out the com­pla­cen­cy of soci­ety, she namechecks a list of pow­er­ful abusers: Don­ald Trump, Pablo Picas­so, Har­vey Wein­stein, Bill Cos­by, Woody Allen, Roman Polan­s­ki. These men are not excep­tions,” she says, they are the rule. They are not indi­vid­u­als – they are our sto­ries. And the moral of our sto­ry is, We don’t give a shit. We don’t give a fuck about women or chil­dren. We only care about a man’s rep­u­ta­tion.’ What about his humanity?”

In her deliv­ery, Gadsby’s voice cracks, and she seems to be on the verge of tears. Her pal­pa­ble anger comes from a painful place – she returns to a joke from ear­li­er in her set, about a con­fronta­tion she had in a car park with a man who thought she was flirt­ing with his girl­friend, and tells the truth behind the com­e­dy bit – the man attacked her. That’s not fun­ny, though – and it speaks to the way in which women mine our most painful expe­ri­ences and sani­tise them to try and get past them, laugh­ing because it’s eas­i­er than con­fronting the awful real­i­ty. Gads­by refus­es to play that game anymore.

Nanette is an exer­cise in hon­est sto­ry­telling as much as it is a sharp skew­er­ing of West­ern society’s entrenched misog­y­ny and homo­pho­bia, in which Gadsby’s anger is a cat­a­lyst. What I would have done to have heard a sto­ry like mine,” she laments. To feel less alone. To feel con­nect­ed.” Women are so rarely allowed to be angry in our cul­ture (after all, where did the word hys­teric’ come from?) and in unleash­ing her rage at the misog­y­ny and homo­pho­bia which has impact­ed upon her life, Gads­by forces her audi­ence to sit up and pay attention.

Silence fol­lows. This ten­sion? It’s yours. I am not help­ing you any­more. You need to learn what this feels like, because this ten­sion is what not-nor­mals car­ry inside of them all of the time, because it is dan­ger­ous to be dif­fer­ent.” It’s 2018, and Gads­by is bang on. For all the laugh­ter, all the jokes, homo­pho­bia, racism and misog­y­ny are still ram­pant with­in soci­ety. And the pain? The pain of being dif­fer­ent or feel­ing like some­thing is wrong with you? That doesn’t go away because you can laugh about it.

But far from being a ral­ly­ing cry for the angry, Gads­by points out that Anger, even if it’s con­nect­ed to laugh­ter, will not relieve ten­sion. Anger is a ten­sion.” It’s not enough to be angry. In fact, as Gads­by points out, anger ulti­mate­ly only leads to hate. And com­e­dy? Com­e­dy can’t heal us either. Laugh­ter is not our med­i­cine,” says Gads­by. Sto­ries hold our cure.”

Every woman has a sto­ry. Every per­son who’s ever been told there’s some­thing wrong with them has a sto­ry. I have a sto­ry, and for so long I tried, like Han­nah Gads­by, to paper over the cracks in that del­i­cate façade with laugh­ter and anger and drink­ing and drugs and any­thing that offered a tiny moment of relief from the pain. But as Gads­by says, There is noth­ing stronger than a bro­ken woman who has rebuilt her­self.” Nanette is a pow­er­ful, per­ti­nent tes­ta­ment to this, and beyond call­ing bull­shit on the abuse that is so entrenched with­in our soci­ety, has the pow­er to make us feel less alone.

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