Seventeen minutes into her new Netflix special, titled Nanette, Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby announces her decision to leave comedy: “I have built a career out of self-deprecating humor, and I don’t want to do that anymore,” she says. “Because do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation.”
In this exquisitely structured performance, Gadsby, who has a degree in art history, stands to force an unexpected reckoning in the comedy world, the art world, and beyond. She unpacks the tricks of the standup trade, reflecting on the ways in which artists and comedians often reinforce, rather than challenge, entrenched power structures and oppressive cultural narratives. Her performance could change the game for the comedy genre’s limited framework. If The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling was a revelation, Nanette is a revolution.
Gadsby grew up in Tasmania, where homosexuality was a crime until 1997, and where some 70% of her community believed homosexuals were subhuman pedophiles. She learned to hate homosexuals well before realizing she was one. “You don’t get to just flip a switch on that,” she says in Nanette. “You internalize that homophobia, and hate yourself … soaking in shame.”
As an adult, every joke about coming out reopened those wounds, preventing resolution. “Punch lines need trauma because punchlines need tension, and tension feeds trauma,” Gadsby says. Her exceptional control of such tension, she claims, derives from her lifelong sense that she is the tension.
But at this point it's so pedestrian an observation that the artist "is" the art that there's nothing particularly unique about the claim except subsidiarity marketing based on identity studies.
Comedians can do a lot of variations on jokes but there are ultimately two modes of humor--laughing with and laughing at. These modes can continuously overlap, obviously, but there are still these two modes. There may be a lot to be said in favor of advising people to feel shame about who and what they have been willing to laugh at but there's nothing necessarily revolutionary about that.
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Gadsby’s thoughts on trauma and art history merge in a powerful reflection on her own experiences with abuse and on the abusive behavior of some of history’s powerful artists, such as Pablo Picasso, who had an infamous sexual affair with a 17-year-old girl, Marie-Thérèse Walter. “Picasso said, ‘It was perfect, I was in my prime and she was in her prime,’” Gadsby says. Picasso’s behavior is often framed as evidence of his magnetism and unbridled passion, despite the fact that, in France in 1927, corruption of a minor was a crime punishable by imprisonment. At one point, Picasso moved closer to a children’s camp that Walter attended, and would pull her away from pool activities to a cabana for sex. “Our mistake,” Gadsby notes, “was to invalidate the perspective of a 17-year-old girl because we believed her potential was never going to equal his.”
Wasn't it earlier this year that an academic by name of Ronell was defended as having made important contributions to the field as a variable to keep in mind in the wake of allegations of harassment? The trouble at this point is that it's not just artists for whom defenses get made that they've done so much ... .
Now it may be cynical to say that ultimately all arts coverage is still some kind of publicity but when we get this next part it seems to prove the point.
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The New Yorker recently deemed Nanette the perfect comedy performance for the #MeToo movement. But it is up to consumers of art to ensure that Gadsby’s contribution to the #MeToo discourse does not get put on one metaphoric shelf while abusive artists persist on another, heroism preserved. Artists who abuse power should, at minimum, carry a big asterisk next to their names in books, classrooms, and museums. Great art alone does not justify the actions of abusive and morally corrupt men. If Picasso’s cabana series, painted between 1927 and 1938, is inspired by the sexual abuse of a minor, that should be included in contextual descriptions. What institution would be so bold? Why is the notion of including such contextual information considered bold in the first place? Do the creative contributions of an abusive artist somehow offset the damage he does? Picasso once said that women were “goddesses and doormats,” which, as Gadsby points out, echoes art history’s lose-lose dichotomy of women represented as virgins or whores. Gadsby’s critiques of both comedy and art history demonstrate that these respective disciplines, the institutions that uphold them, and the audiences that consume them often leave marginalized people with few desirable opportunities to be heard.
“I love angry white man comedy. It’s so funny, it’s hilarious. They’re adorable. Why are they angry? If they are having a tough time, the rest of us are goners,” Gadsby jokes. Several times in Nanette, she critiques the male voices that dominate comedy, punctuating the tension with comments like “just jokes” or “lighten up,” appropriating the average comedian’s default, flippant response to accusations of bigotry or offensiveness. In just two words, Gadsby illuminates how, since time immemorial, men have gotten to decide who is pathological. Just ask Zelda Fitzgerald or Vivian Eliot, who died in mental institutions, where they were placed by their husbands. You know who owns their written work today? The estates of the men that discarded them. Even women artists who retained their own creative legacies are often still overshadowed by men. For example, the books of Martha Gellhorn, the famous American war correspondent and Depression-era journalist, can be found next to her ex-husband Ernest Hemingway’s novels in your local library. She published before she married Hemingway and after they divorced, yet her story is now a subtitle to his. As Kate Zambreno wrote in Heroines, “the patriarch decides on the form of communication. Decides on the language. The patriarch is the one who rewrites.”
Pointing out that Hemingway was a self absorbed lout is so pedestrian and staid an observation it can be made by an author at National Review. Terry Teachout summed up how much can change in the perception of an author when he wrote about a Hemingway biography just last year:
If they had much else in common, I’m damned if I know what it is, though a case can be made that they shared a fair amount of doubt about their masculinity. Hemingway, needless to say, was a textbook bully, snuffling out weakness in others in order to paper over his own middle-of-the-night terrors. It says everything about him that he gossiped in print about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis. [emphasis added] As for Fitzgerald, he was a charming, chronically unsure drunk who doubted everything about himself but the size of his talent, about which he had no doubts at all. They were far too ill sorted to be friends but went through the motions anyway, which is one reason we persist in thrusting them into the same Bruckner-and-Mahleresque pigeonhole: Scott & Ernest, Inc., Great American Writers of the Lost Generation.
The trouble with Hemingway, seen from the privileged vantage point of hindsight, is that he looks increasingly like a great influence but not a great author in his own right. [emphasis added] No 20th-century writer would leave a deeper mark on his contemporaries, and as late as 1948, Evelyn Waugh, no respecter of reputations, unhesitatingly described him in print as “one of the most original and powerful of living writers.” Yet all but the very finest of his short stories now sound mannered and artificial, while the novels come off as little more than sustained exercises in mirror-gazing and pose-striking. I would like to like him more than I do, but the truth is that I find him almost unreadable, and my chronic distaste for his work is more than merely an allergy.
What is it about Hemingway that so many of today’s readers find so off-putting? The fact that he proved to be so imitable is a big part of the problem, and it didn’t help that most of the imitation was popularization. Among other things, the author of “The Killers” inadvertently invented the detective story, not to mention film noir, and inspired a generation of hack writers, all of them men, who longingly mistook his self-constructed legend for reality. [emphasis added]...
Unlike Teachout, I've never really liked Hemingway and I don't feel the least bit bad about having never liked him as much as some people actually like Hemingway's work. Even if Hemingway "really" invented the detective story in the hard-boiled sense he didn't invent the parlor mystery and other writers refined the more modernist hard-boiled detective story. But a generation of hack writers, that seems on the mark. So while Gadsby may have plenty to say about Hemingway reception vs. those women whom he had his flings with, there's just about nothing revolutionary about noting that hacks behaving badly being greeted as heroes of their respective generations.
Fast forward a few months and over at The Baffler a substantially different take on Gadsby emerges. It probably doesn't need to be said that in quoting from HyperAllergic and The Baffler I'm quoting from two self-identified left/radical publications. If Joss Whedon wanted to make a case that the trouble with left/progressive writers and social media users is they too often attack each other this "could" be some kind of case study ... but it's kind of hard to take Joss Whedon seriously at this point. After twenty-five years the one-trick pony nature of his shtick has worn thin for me. But for the previously reported quitting of comedy ...
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In terms of overall quality, Nanette is mediocre. While other high profile comedians take a break from standup to give TED Talks, Gadsby’s special erodes the separation between the two, down to the oversized, antiseptic set and the comic’s persistently neutral affect, physically restrained, with a voice that often sounds like a soothingly patronizing life coach. Much of her material is equally familiar, presenting near-platitudes covered endlessly in the wake of #MeToo—the myopic male gaze in art, the separation of art from the artist, the limited view of woman as either virgin or whore, the unwelcome, transgressive anger of women, the control exacted over our stories by powerful men like Harvey Weinstein. “Do you know who used to be an easy punch line? Monica Lewinsky,” Gadsby tells the Sydney Opera House audience three months after the former White House intern had deployed the #MeToo hashtag, eliciting a culture-wide reassessment of her treatment post-Clinton.
“Gadsby’s material is almost two years in the making and seems to harness the broader fury of the #MeToo moment,” writes Moira Donegan in The New Yorker. “Gadsby, like many women, is done hiding her anger, and in Nanette she bends the bounds of standup to accommodate it.” Except she doesn’t. Gadsby doesn’t bend the medium, she abandons it. “This is why I must quit comedy, because the only way I can tell my truth and put tension in the room is with anger,” she says. This is not revolution, it is surrender. Unable to subvert the status quo or to reinvent it, Gadsby claims to reject the system in which she continues to operate. [emphasis added] Bending the bounds of standup to accommodate your anger is Mo’Nique performing a meta-set called I Coulda Been Your Cellmate within the grounds of an Ohio women’s prison and using the suspension of reality created by her act to break the facility’s rules and summon a group hug.
Nanette validates the mainstream culture’s belief that oppression is not something you can joke about. “You do understand what self-deprecation means from somebody who already exists in the margins?” Gadsby asks, re-evaluating her prior approach to comedy. “It’s not humility. It’s humiliation.” Again, it sounds good, but it’s not entirely true. Maria Bamford is just one counter-example. The frenetic genre-bending comedian uses self-deprecation to destigmatize mental illness by illuminating its absurdity. In 2006’s The Now Show she sings an improvisational tune her therapist prescribes to quell her anxieties. “If I keep the kitchen floor clean, no one will die!” she caws. “As long as I clench my fists at odd intervals, the darkness within me won’t force me to do anything inappropriately violent or sexual at dinner parties!” Margaret Cho, on the other hand, uses self-deprecation to highlight Hollywood’s racism. Discussing her sitcom, All-American Girl, during her show I’m the One That I Want, she says, “Because I wasn’t Asian enough, they decided to hire an Asian Consultant. Because I was fucking it up as an Asian.” On Twitter, writer Peter Moskowitz characterized Gadsby’s dismissal of self-deprecation as “lazy” because it erases a tradition found in both queer and Jewish cultures. “Self-deprecation allows us to find our self-hatred from living under cis/hetero/white supremacy and excise it, laugh it off. It is a liberatory act,” they tweeted, adding, “Why do you think Jews gravitated toward comedy? It’s because of that—because it feels good to laugh at yourself, and make non-Jews feel uncomfortable in the process.”
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It is understandable that Gadsby, as badly treated as she has been by men, would want to reject an industry they continue to dominate and use, no less, to further abuse women. How to operate as a queer woman within such a system? The simplest, most palatable answer is to refuse participation, and Gadsby knows it. [emphasis added] She is well aware of the resonance of such a choice in today’s politically charged climate of art consumption, in which a socially “necessary” work needn’t concern itself with any of the standards by which we’ve traditionally judged art—say, by whether your standup routine is funny. As she told Variety, “in order to find this success, I really did need to declare I was quitting comedy and mean it.” The joke is on us for buying a story that has since proven as misleading as a punchline. “I said I was quitting, and if I quit, I’m an idiot now,” Gadsby said on The Tonight Show. “If the show had gone as badly as I’d planned, it would’ve worked, but now I’m left with the choice: I’ll either be an idiot or a hypocrite. I’ll be a hypocrite.” [emphasis added]
To buy the joke we first have to know who Gadsby is, and then take the further step of caring who she is. For all of the neo-Calvinist American dudes who think it's a big deal what John Piper does or does not endorse a super-majority of English-speaking people, to say nothing of the world, are going to ask "John who?"
Having read a smattering of journalistic coverage of Gadsby's show and having seen that arts coverage is publicity of some kind or another for someone who I'd never heard of before prior to the announcement of quitting, Gadsby may really have "meant it" at the time, but it comes off like the furniture store that has a going out of business sale every other year with the promise that this time it's for real until the sales ensure that the business can continue.
Since humor is laughing at as well as laughing with it's simply not tenable to claim that self-deprecating humor is the only kind of humor, which anyone could observe. Maybe it's supposed to be ironic that Gadsby found her success after declaring she was quitting comedy and meaning it but we live in an era, suffused as it is with internet-transmitted headlines and coverage, where it can seem like the only principle way to engage social media and media issues is to sell out. It's not that the bad news is that that's always bad, the bad news is, for some people at least, that that kind of viral selling out seems to be the prerequisite for even "being" at all in the contemporary information economy. If nothing less than viral is worth talking about then whether or not anything monetized and viral in the arts will even be talked about may be one of any number of things Banksy is theoretically getting at with the self-shredding painting.
