'I sort of felt adrift from the standup world': Hannah Gadsby on the impact of her hit special Nanette

Click the play button above to listen to Tom Power's full conversation with Hannah Gadsby on The Q Interview podcast.

The brilliant irony about the arrival of comedian Hannah Gadsby is that she made a major career breakthrough by performing a standup comedy special about quitting comedy.

The show Nanette was released on Netflix in 2018 and became, internationally, a performance people couldn't stop talking about. It was a comedy where the jokes weren't simply a mask for traumas; they were clearly layered with them.

Gadsby's new memoir, Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation, travels through the events of her life that led to the groundbreaking special. Gadsby, who described writing the book as "a monumental pain in the spiritual arse of my life," goes all the way back to her early days as a "serious child." She grew up as the youngest of five kids in rural Tasmania, an island state of Australia where homosexuality wasn't decriminalized until 1997.

This homophobic political history resurfaced around the time Gadsby started to write Nanette in 2015. Australian headlines were dominated by the country's ugly national debate over the legality of same-sex marriages. 

"[Nanette] wasn't a show that I did because I thought it was going to be successful — or that even it should be successful," said Gadsby in an interview with Q's Tom Power.

"It was a compulsion. I felt I had something to say. I felt like nobody was saying it as I needed it to be said in the world."

Nanette felt like a pivotal moment for comedy as a whole. Gadsby made audiences laugh to be sure, but she also made them think. She deconstructed the punchline and reflected on making a career out of being the butt of her own jokes. She then went further and laid bare some of the most harrowing moments of her life, being targeted as a queer woman, and the attacks she survived and rebuilt herself from.

The show was an answer to the question, could standup comedy do more than serve as a temporary balm? As comedian Tig Notaro put it to the New York Times, Gadsby had "cleared the table for necessary regrowth."

WATCH | Official trailer for Nanette:

Gadsby performed the show over 250 times, through Australia, the U.K., the U.S. and Canada. Some audience members walked out. Some demanded refunds. It was hard not to focus on the negatives, an impulse that comedians are "blessed with," Gadsby said. 

But ultimately, the people she did reach — the audience members who told her they were tremendously moved — won out. And surprised her.

"I thought the only people who would get it were people who experienced, you know, life in a similar way or had similar experiences," Gadsby said.

"But what the show was … in the act of vulnerability that it was, was a human show. And humans responded to it."

Nanette was a global phenomenon on Netflix by the time Gadsby arrived to perform it at Montreal's Just For Laughs Comedy Festival. While her audience was full of supporters, Gadsby had been feeling "adrift" from the standup comedy world for a while. Part of that was due to a need to self-isolate and conserve her own energy, but there was also a sense of resentment she was feeling from her colleagues.

"There was a lot of love for me, but there was more not-love," said Gadsby.

She attributed it to "professional jealousy," a common hazard in any industry, but also the fact that she's not from North America and was having such success with a standup show that subverted tradition.

"I didn't go up through the ranks as perhaps people think you should. I came from nowhere. And in the process of coming from nowhere, I was pulling apart the art form," Gadsby said.

"[I] felt the resentment, and that was a little shocking."

Out of all the performances Gadsby did of Nanette, the live taping at the Sydney Opera House had perhaps the highest stakes. Her mother had come, uninvited, and was sitting in the audience.

Her parents had come to a previous showing, but Gadsby omitted the most traumatic parts of her show to protect them. This time, Gadsby had no choice but to perform Nanette in its fullest, most raw form.

The lights were a bit brighter for the filming, and as she looked into the crowd, she spotted her mother's "distinctive … crop of white hair."

"My eyes just picked it out … and so then I was just hyperaware of Mum," said Gadsby.

"But in that sense, I think it worked. It's part of what I think makes the filmed version a powerful document … I think we captured something here because I'm delivering this really painful show to the only person in the world whose pain would be equal to mine."

Nanette is about pain but also reinvention. For those who hadn't heard of Gadsby before, it was an unforgettable introduction.

Gadsby followed Nanette with Douglas, a standup show named after her dog, which also streamed on Netflix with great success. She's now on tour with the show Body of Work.

• Life after Nanette: Hannah Gadsby opens up (from quarantine) about her crusading new special Douglas

"Because I'm successful, I'm able to focus on the craft, which is a real privilege. You know, I have the ways and means of working with the nuts and bolts of it, which is what I really love," said Gadsby.

"I am afraid of … not success, that seems fine, but it's more that sort of pressure of the crowds.… I don't want to be someone who has 'stans' … I really want people to come to each of my shows with a fresh mind to be challenged or to challenge me."

Last summer, Gadsby received an honourary doctorate from the University of Tasmania. In her speech to the graduating class, Gadsby shared what her wife says to her in moments of anxiety: "Don't panic. Who do you want to be?"

"It's just worked really well for me because … you sort of think about not what you should do in the specifics but how you want to approach things. What sort of person do you want to be?" said Gadsby.

"Sometimes there's no right choice, like no good choice. But that sort of thing sort of helps me take a step back from sort of troubling things."

Written by Jane van Koeverden. Interview produced by Jennifer Warren.