Hannah Gadsby Doesn’t Like Art

Okay it’s reached a point where I have to say something. Every person who adds their name to the growing list of people applauding Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix comedy special “Nanette” makes it more and more necessary for someone to offer a rebuttal. I don’t like being a public contrarian. I’d rather let people have their fun if I don’t like something. But there’s a difference between not liking something and having a strong oppositional relationship to its core thesis. And let’s be clear: “Nanette” has a very assertive central thesis. It’s 40% fine stand-up, 60% TED Talk about the futility of art, comedy in particular. And I care too much about art to take that shit lying down.

I can say this about Hannah Gadsby: she’s good at what she does. It is an expertly crafted show. She even manages to point out just how she’s manipulating her audience while she successfully pulls it off. Bravo. But all art is emotional manipulation, so this is in no way unique to stand-up nor is it necessarily, as she asserts, abusive. It’s a power that the audience grants you, a trust that you will drive their emotions safely to their destination. What you do with that power determines whether it’s abusive or not.

And I would argue that Hannah Gadsby definitely abuses that power here.

To invite an audience to a comedy show only to indict them for expecting you to make them laugh is a move brash enough to be punk if she were to embrace the anger behind it enough to properly alienate us or allow for catharsis. But she disguises her discomfort with her own anger in false assertions about art, comedy, and mental and emotional health. I care too much about those things to allow for the emotional resonance of “Nanette” to cloud critical thinking about its substance. 

Now, that emotional resonance is real. This is not an indictment of anyone who found her story compelling or helpful to hear. 

But let’s talk about her assertions. 

1. Comedy is about manufacturing and releasing tension. Sure. Not exactly particular to comedy. All storytelling, even the type she switches to halfway through, is about manipulating tension. Dynamics keep things engaging. That’s why we watch.
2. Comedy only gives you a beginning and a middle, stories give you a beginning, middle, and an end. Bullshit. The type of bullshit that sounds good but means fuck all. Every form of storytelling is fiction. Every form of expression is incomplete. Every narrative that has ever existed is an artificially truncated window that shows us what is relevant to its author. There is no such thing as the end of a story. 
3. High art and low art are qualitative distinctions. As someone personally invested in the low arts of animation, comics, and illustration, and who has spent years of her life rigorously studying object performance, melodrama, and clown, I just have to say, kiss my ass. I’m not surprised that Hannah Gadsby’s art history education left her feeling that there’s veracity to this idea, but I am disappointed that she never, in all her soul-searching about her role in comedy, never questioned it. I know I’m fortunate to have gone to an elite art school embedded with a history that celebrates lower art forms, because I get that it’s rare. But that counter-narrative has been there for a while, and in comedy it asserts itself in pieces like Tig Notaro’s “Live,” in which she decided to embrace what comedy can be rather than rejecting it on its face, and worked out the injustice of cancer on the fly with her audience. She invited us into that pain with comedy. And, like the guy in the audience said, it was incredible. It didn’t fix her cancer. It didn’t right any wrongs. Art can’t do that. But it can make living with cancer easier. And it can make dealing with a friends’ death to cancer easier, as it did for me. It was one of two brutally honest expressions of the reality of cancer that I have ever found in a pop culture media saturated with cancer-porn (the other, by the way, is “A Monster Calls,” a low art children’s book). And Tig expressed that while still doing her job and being so funny I cry every time. So yeah, I reject absolutely the idea that comedy, being a lower art form, can never express the truth of a story.  Go fuck yourself. 
4. Anger and tension are inherently bad. As someone who has recently had PTSD panic attacks because of my inability to express my anger, fuck you very much. Anger doesn’t disappear because you don’t want it anymore. Because it poisons you. Because it distorts you from the inside and all you want is to find joy and some fucking peace again but you can’t because you’re trapped inside your head and it’s so rage-filled that you can’t breathe. Yeah, I relate. But nobody’s ever once helped me by telling me my anger is something I should let go of. No. When that anger is tightly locked around my sense of self, acting as a last defense, I can’t let it go. Instead my anger is something I have to exorcise from my body every so often. I’ve learned over many years of therapy how to do this constructively and not destructively, and oddly enough one of the constructive ways is through comedy. Maybe not stand-up, though I know people who have started stand-up as a coping mechanism, but in the sense that comedy is always about finding the ways in which our experiences are ridiculous, and in our darkest moments, a little perspective shift toward the absurd can be a fucking lifeline. 
5. Picasso is unimportant because he was a misogynist asshole. This one may seem petty to harp on comparatively but here’s the thing: I actually thought while watching “Nanette,” “you know what, I should thank god every day that I live in a post-Cubism world.” I’m legit super glad about that. You should be too. Because the effect that Cubism had on the discourse around art allowed for the opportunity of myriad new voices to engage in it. Because just because Picasso held a kaleidoscope up to his dick doesn’t mean the advent of the kaleidoscope isn’t fucking important. Point it at something more interesting. Pick a different viewfinder. Stop wasting my time.
6. All of this is why she has to quit comedy. Look, Hannah Gadsby can quit or not quit. I want her to do what’s best for her. I left acting because I knew what it required of me would break me psychologically, so I get it. I get trying to find another way to tell your story. And I get the injustice of having to do that when what is breaking you is bullshit. It’s bullshit that people don’t think women are funny. It’s bullshit that people expect non-cis-het-white-men to perform their otherness for them. It’s bullshit that we are othered at all. It’s bullshit that women are discounted if they don’t align with hetero-male desires. It’s all bullshit. But that’s not comedy’s fault. Just like it wasn’t acting’s fault that part of being socialized female is not believing you deserve to take up space, and so standing on stage and demanding attention was excruciating for me. It sucks. It’s not fair. I wanted to be an actor and I can’t. But if I were to say the reason is that all acting is lying—that it’s all bullshit; it’s all curated and rehearsed and blocked; even the most realistic and moving performances are a big fat lie, and therefore it’s an art form inadequate to express the truth of my story—If I were to make that claim, I hope to hell all my theatre peeps would come out of the woodwork to tell me to stop disrespecting their field, and I’d hope at least one person in my life might tell me to stop being so precious about my damn story. No. It’s simply unhealthy for me to tell my stories that way. So I don’t. 

Gadsby makes reference in the special to a classic anti-female joke that I happen to love. Her version involves crowd work around lesbians not laughing at jokes about lesbians, but the version I learned was this: “How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Pause. “That’s not funny.” 

But it is! Because feminists can’t take a joke! Because the constant threat of male violence is real for us and we’re a little touchy when people try to invalidate our anger at that by telling us to lighten up! It’s funny! 

But no, it actually is funny. It’s funny precisely for the reasons I just said. It’s funny precisely for the reasons Hannah Gadsby points out: the joke is a trap. Because if you don’t laugh, you prove the point. It’s a perfect encapsulation of what it feels like to be marginalized. 

That’s why I laugh, anyway. But not everyone laughs for those reasons. And I get it. That’s scary. It’s scary to put something painful and personal up on stage and not know why people are laughing. Because comedy is personal. We can’t be told to laugh. We can’t be scolded into mirth. But what Gadsby does in response to this scary prospect is to abdicate her role as comedian and instead try to lecture us and make us feel what she wants us to feel. And if we don’t, we prove her point. It’s a trap. 

There’s nothing I resent more as an audience member than being told how I’m supposed to feel about what I just experienced. If I can’t be inspired by Hannah Gadsby’s confessional second act because I’m too distracted by how angry her false assertions are making me, the “clapter” holds she punctuates her performance with do a good job making me feel like it’s a moral failure on my part and not the result of her disrespecting the craft I had the audacity to expect her to practice in her stand-up comedy special.

Sorry, I must have skipped a dose. Just kidding, I can feel all this while medicated.

If you found her story moving, great. I'm all for it. If you found her willingness to tell it inspiring, fucking beautiful. I'm glad people are connecting with her experience. But I personally hope the future of comedy is filled with people who like comedy, who don’t think it’s fundamentally inadequate, and who have the buoyancy of spirit to look at the darkest stories in our lives and ask, “what’s funny about this?”