"Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby recently found huge mainstream acknowledgement with her Netflix special, “Nanette.” During the special, Gadsby announces her distaste for making jokes, saying they belittle her personal traumatic past, and that she will no longer make them. She meant it. The rest of the special was a retelling of the awful things that have happened to her, complete with cutting emotion, and several political calls to action. …It feels like a bait-n-switch for those who have followed them to laugh a few times a day.
Yes. Do you think this is some kind of an example of a well loved incident of a comedy getting all preachy? It’s one of the tops in the well hated “very special episode” canon.
I think it may be because they have the same sense of humor and the way she talks or how she moves. I asked my daughter now and her reply is, “I don’t know, it’s just how she acts”. Maybe it’s some kind of autistic gay-dar? It could also be her sensible style of dress we see with a lot of other autistic girls and women in our support groups, often due to the sensory issues and just a basic desire for practical comfort. My daughter is 13 and maybe doesn’t quite get the stereotypical lesbian sensible-shoe style, but she wore a men’s suit to her school dance this year so she may be clued in more than her old mama.
Reiterating what I said earlier, I don’t disagree that it could be considered a bait and switch; I just think that was a major point of it, and it wouldn’t have worked as well as I (and clearly a lot of other people) felt it did without that set up.
Take the story she told about flirting with the woman at the bus stop. When she first tells it during the earlier part of the set, when it still seems to be a straight-forward comedy show, it’s just a bit. The woman’s boyfriend shows up, sees her flirting with the girlfriend, starts to get angry, but then realizes the butch-looking person flirting with his girlfriend is a woman, and all is well. Just a funny story, and it gets a laugh from the audience. Then, later on, when the show has taken a more serious turn, she brings it up again, and says that, yeah, in reality, the guy ended up beating the shit out of her. That’s the reality. Obviously, if she had just included that information when she first told the story, it would not have gotten a laugh at all. And when she tells the full story later on, it’s all the more powerful because the audience knows it was laughing at the story just a little bit earlier. It’s all the more powerful specifically BECAUSE of the bait-and-switch.
Or it could be that what the daughter is seeing are gay signifiers and that is resonating with her? And due to her current innocence is mistaking them for autistic signifiers, because that is what she has identity experience with?
Then I think your problem is actually with Netflix, because I guarantee you that Hannah Gadsby has no control over what category Netflix lists her show under.
That said, Nanette is clearly a comedy special, just one that goes on to deconstruct usual comedy special structure to make some salient, important, powerful points.
Distributors/producers/marketers of movies misdescribe them quite often, in my experience. They’ll describe a drama as “comedy”. I don’t know why, the people who would want to see the drama might pass it by, those looking for a “comedy” will be annoyed by not having endless nonsense on-screen. I’ve never understood why they do it. It was very common when I’d rent tapes or dvds and you’d get all the previews at the start.
One movie that’s always puzzled me as a “comedy” is “Muriel’s Wedding”. Yes, some funny bits, but also some very sad and serious themes and events in the movie.
How shows are presented to consumers is down to the marketers, not the performers.
I find it interesting that most people commenting still seem to have watched the whole show through. I haven’t watched it yet, but I “know” Hannah from the TV, she was a regular on one(?) of Adam Hills’ shows, I think. If you’ve seen his shows, he doesn’t shy away from social commentary. If you’d seen Hannah on tv with Adam, you might have a bit more of an idea that there’d be some serious content.
Your OP is based on the premise that Nanette is a lie. That it started as a comedy show, and ended as a Ted Talk.
Here is a Ted Talk given by Taika Waititi. Its supposed to be a Ted Talk but we laugh all the way through it. Did that start as a Ted Talk and end as a comedy show? Was this a bait and switch? Or was it a Ted Talk all along which just happened to be funny?
Nanette never stopped being a comedy show. It had some deadly serious moments. But that didn’t stop it from being a comedy. In his latest special on Netflix Jim Jefferies talks about his depression. The bit lasts less than a minute. And then he gets back to the funny. But that bit about depression recontextualised the entire performance. Did that 30 seconds of seriousness mean that “This is Me Now” is no longer a comedy? How many minutes of seriousness turn a comedy into a Ted Talk?
You managed to find three reviews that used the words “bait and switch” in them. Well done. Two of those reviews used them in a completely different context to the way you used it. The third? Well you cited the Federalist. The sub-heading of that particular article is “Who needs laughter when you can use your broadcast time to lazily slam the president or talk about a rape and be hailed as a hero?” The lead story’s on the main page of the Federalist is “OBAMA REFRAINS FROM ENDORSING SOCIALIST OCASIO-CORTEZ FOR THE 2018 MIDTERMS” and “WATCH THIS HERO MOM STOP A HOME INVADER WITH HER SHOTGUN”. (Bolding not mine.) So excuse me for taking anything they say with a big grain of salt.
Should Different Strokes be categorized as a drama just because for a few minutes of a single episode they featured a pedophile? Is it not still a comedy? Is it a lie to call it a comedy?
Yes, you need to hear her story. Because her story is one of the many LGBT stories that are silenced by the media. Her story is similar to that of many LGBT people. That was the entire message: that white privilege blinds people to the hardships of LGBT people, who have to go up and perform for you for you to even bother listening to what they have to say.
There is nothing at all in her performance that suggests she was looking for validation. She never implied she was asking for permission to be who she was. She was telling people what she was going to do. She was saying something that needs be said. This is her farewell tour, and she said why she was leaving, while also furthering the LGBT cause.
Granted, as I said, the people who most need to hear it are the ones who are most likely to tune out. The privileged white people who ignore the struggles of LGBT people are going to tune out the second she mentions that these people are the most easily offended.
But it’s true. She’s telling the truth. She’s saying something that needs to be said. She used comedy for one of its primary purposes: to discuss topics that cannot normally be brought up. As someone else pointed out, it’s not too dissimilar to what George Carlin did, but people don’t act like he bamboozled them.
Like Carlin, you don’t go to Gadsby’s shows for escapism. Her comedy had always been about actual issues. Anyone going to her show would know what type of comedian she was. The only people being surprised are people who are finding out about it because it kinda went viral.
But you have to be careful from assuming the reverse is true. That those who tune out are necessarily the ones who need to hear it.
I found her annoying, unfunny and correct and didn’t want to listen to her anymore but that doesn’t mean any lack of sympathy with what she’s been through or any lack of understanding regarding the struggles of LGBT people.
A criticism of her act is not a criticism of her nor what she stands up for. I hope you agree with that.
Yeah. If you’re not offended by her jokes or remarks and you think she has a right to do what she likes with her own comedy show, then why do you feel the need to express annoyance or disapproval of what she chose to do with it? You’re not going to like every item of entertainment out there, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that the entertainer did something wrong or that they should be reprimanded for their choices.
Judging from the standing ovation etc., it appears that the vast majority of people who paid to see Hannah Gadsby found her show pretty damn entertaining. Maybe not in a lighthearted escapist way the whole time, but that’s not the only valid form of entertainment. So you can ease off on scolding Gadsby for disappointing her audience.
Personally, while I enjoyed most of the jokes I didn’t find Nanette either as amusing or as moving as the typical viewer seems to have done. But I was super impressed by Gadsby’s insight and masterly control of her craft. My vote is that Nanette was pretty good as comedy and absolutely superb as meta-comedy. I haven’t seen a more brilliant example of comedy-in-the-service-of-subverting-comedy-viewers’-expectations since That Mitchell and Webb Look’s season 4 finale (the “Holmes in the nursing home” one).
Are you seriously arguing that it’s out of line for comedians to boldly assert their angry opinions in the form of factual statements? FFS, that’s what comedians do. Haven’t you noticed?
So far, all the specific complaints and reproaches I’ve seen about Nanette are sufficiently silly and illogical to make me wonder if the complainers deep down are angered by something else and trying to rationalize it. Something along the lines of “I lost interest when it got preachy” seems to me like a natural reaction if you just didn’t happen to like the show all that much. But reactions like “felt like I was conned” and “rubbed me the wrong way” and “did somewhat offend me” and “She feels sorry for me? really?” and “they’re not paying you for the privilege of being your shrink” and “fuck you just a little bit” seem… different.
I wasn’t dealing with jack shit at the time and that sketch STILL made me cry. Fuck artists for having the temerity to use art to unsettle their audiences, eh?
Maybe it’s some kind of autistic gay-dar? It could also be her sensible style of dress we see with a lot of other autistic girls and women in our support groups, often due to the sensory issues and just a basic desire for practical comfort. My daughter is 13 and maybe doesn’t quite get the stereotypical lesbian sensible-shoe style, but she wore a men’s suit to her school dance this year so she may be clued in more than her old mama.