There’s been no discussion of Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette” so I thought I’d get it started. This is a Netflix show billed as standup comedy and Gadsby recounts her life as a lesbian in Tasmania, Australia. It includes the standard stories of being marginalized as well as horrific accounts of being beaten and raped. I follow many comedians and comedy performers on Twitter and my feed was buzzing with praise for the show a few months ago. It was perfectly timed for the #MeToo movement. It has won several awards, including a best standup show award from the comedy festival in Montreal. Vox described it thusly: “Nanette is nominally a standup special, but it is so meta and so thoughtful about the issues inherent to standup comedy as a genre that it seems to break through those boundaries: It is funny, and it is uncomfortable, and it is immensely moving. And since its premiere on Netflix in June, it has become wildly critically acclaimed.” My feelings are more ambivalent. While Gadsby is a skilled comedian, my biggest problem is calling it a standup special. For me, there’s an especially poignant moment when Gadsby reveals an unexpected twist about her mother. But too much of the rest is anger and rage. There’s no comedy at the core. Richard Pryor dealt with social issues; Sam Kinison raged with the best of them. But it was built around comedy. I think if I went in expecting a one-person show, I would have liked it better. A bigger problem that I’ve had is that she performed this show dozens of times before she recorded the Netflix special and apparently now more than a hundred times altogether. When she summons the rage and anger like she does in “Nanette,” it’s no longer an honest, soul-revealing moment for me if she’s done it so much. It’s artful manipulation. I’m sure Pryor told his childhood stories thousands of times, but the fact it was built around comedy kept it believable. Michael Che of “Saturday Night Live” fame criticized the show on his Instagram account and other places. Che has since deleted all of his Instagram posts. He was used by a couple of conservative publications to attack the show. This is some of what Che wrote: “ya know some critics say rape jokes arent funny. but you know whats DEFINITELY not funny? rape stories. just flat out, fully detailed rape stories. I dunno about you, but that hasnt made me laugh once.” Che also wrote: “I dont wanna have to ‘survive’ a comedy special. I wanna laugh. lets not make this what its not.” Another quibble is that Gadsby targets white males for the oppression of LGBT and for the violence against her. Clearly white males are a strong influence in the world’s culture. But I wonder how her perspective might have changed if she didn’t live in a country that is 90 percent white. Tasmania, being situated south of the populated cities, may be even whiter. A few years ago I visited Los Angeles and a group of us were going to dinner. I suggested Chinese or Thai places. A black lesbian absolutely vetoed that. As a teen her family was forced by poverty to live near Koreatown. The East Asian population did not wants blacks moving in. She was harassed and sometimes beaten when she walked to the near grocery store, which was in an Asian neighborhood. Even the store owners were rude to her. Her mother tried to talk to the parents of the teens doing the attacks. They weren’t sympathetic. She at first attributed it to a language barrier, but finally her children explained that the whole community didn’t want them there and that the adults would look the other way. The woman suffered discrimination and brutality both because she was black and because she was a lesbian but not at the hands of white males. I agree with much of what Che is saying. And I think Netflix should list it as a one-person show and not a standup special.
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