The Comedian Hannah Gadsby Goes Big Time, and Renounces Comedy

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Comedian Hannah Gadsby Goes Big Time, and Renounces Comedy

Podcast: The New Yorker Radio Hour
Date: June 19, 2018
Host: David Remnick (WNYC Studios and The New Yorker)
Featured Guests: Hannah Gadsby (comedian), Emily Nussbaum (TV critic), Amanda Petrusich (music critic)

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Overview

This episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour explores the rise of Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, particularly through her groundbreaking show Nanette. The conversation delves into Gadsby's critique of stand-up comedy as both an art form and a societal phenomenon, the pain and vulnerability behind her comedic persona, and her experience breaking new ground in how difficult subjects like trauma, misogyny, and power dynamics are addressed on stage. The episode also includes music festival recommendations from Amanda Petrusich, but the main focus is the in-depth profile and interview with Gadsby by Emily Nussbaum.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Summer Music Festivals (00:32–07:29)

• Amanda Petrusich provides a lively, irreverent rundown of her favorite summer music festivals: Pickathon (Happy Valley, Oregon), Pitchfork Music Festival (Chicago), and Sonic Seasonal (Philadelphia).
  • She highlights the unique qualities of each festival, focusing on diversity, curatorial idiosyncrasy, and offbeat music (02:16–06:54).
  • ("Every attendee gets one plate and one cup that you reuse for the entire weekend." – Amanda Petrusich, 02:12)
• Notable Quirk: Festival talk sets a casual, humorous tone, with jokes about festival discomforts and the joys of watching music from a comfortable chair.
• This segment serves as a prelude to the main feature on Hannah Gadsby.

2. Who is Hannah Gadsby? (07:29–09:15)

• David Remnick introduces Gadsby to American listeners: already a star in Australia, now about to break through in the US with her Netflix special Nanette.
• Emily Nussbaum describes Gadsby’s role in the TV show Please Like Me and her evolution as a stand-up comedian, noting that Nanette is a stark departure from ordinary comedy—funny but also emotionally challenging.

3. The Structure and Ambition of “Nanette” (09:15–13:10)

• Gadsby reveals her decision to stop using self-deprecating humor as a way of seeking permission to occupy space:
  • ("I've built a career out of humiliating myself and putting myself down in order to seek permission to speak ... I have decided I don't want to do that anymore. I will not do that anymore, not to myself." – Hannah Gadsby, 09:15)
• Nussbaum explains how Nanette alternates between soothing and shocking the audience, using stories that begin as jokes but are gradually revealed as painful truths about prejudice and trauma.
• Gadsby shares how, as someone hard to categorize (Tasmanian, larger woman, lesbian), she played with stereotypes for comedic effect, which eventually became limiting:
  • ("When you disrupt, that's instant tension. So that's actually handy. But as my career evolved, it became a real block." – Hannah Gadsby, 10:20)

Autism and Crafting Her Comedy (11:07–11:37)

• Gadsby discusses her late autism diagnosis and how instead of foregrounding it as a subject, she wanted to demonstrate what her “brain can do”—creating “a real clear acknowledgement of how emotion works and how I feel it.”

4. The Nature and Limitations of Stand-Up Comedy (12:18–15:32)

• Gadsby deconstructs how jokes work, their reliance on tension, and the ethical pitfalls of never moving beyond a punchline:
  • ("A joke simply needs two things, a setup and a punch. ... But fucking hell, guys, I'm making you tense over and over again. This is an abusive relationship." – Hannah Gadsby, 12:18–13:10)
• She argues that laughter can mask pain rather than heal it, emphasizing the importance of storytelling for catharsis.
  • ("Laughter is the honey that sweetens the medicine story. ... Stand up comedy ... is one of the rare occasions where a group of strangers get to sit in a room sharing an experience." – Hannah Gadsby, 13:30–14:03)
  • ("The story ... needs three—a beginning, a middle, and an end. ... That is what elevates you. That's where catharsis lives. ... Comedy doesn't do that. ... We stop short, set up, punchline, beginning, middle, there it sits. ... It deals with tension, hence it feeds trauma." – Hannah Gadsby, 14:33–15:27)

5. The Ethics of Comedy: What Jokes Are Acceptable? (15:32–16:18)

• The pair discuss the limits of acceptable jokes (rape, genocide, violence), with Gadsby critiquing comics who justify harmful jokes by audience laughter:
  • ("You can make anyone laugh if you make them tense enough because they want to get rid of the tension." – Hannah Gadsby, 15:50)

6. Vulnerability and Risk: Performing Personal Trauma (16:18–18:49)

• Nussbaum asks about the emotional difficulty of performing such vulnerable material. Gadsby explains how hard it is to resist the urge to relieve tension, how she strategically uses "callbacks" to subvert audience expectations, and her experience with abusive heckling:
  • ("In this show, I subverted that ... I used a callback to drop them into a huge hole and not give them the laugh. ... And also I was getting really horrific heckles ... always after I just told my audience that I'd been sexually assaulted." – Hannah Gadsby, 16:40–17:25)
• Gadsby reflects on the violence of those heckles and how they pushed her toward a more intentional, controlled performance.

7. Authority and Status on Stage; Art History and the MeToo Movement (18:49–21:11)

• Gadsby discusses transitioning from playing a low-status comic (self-deprecating humor) to a more authoritative figure, inspired by her comedy art lectures.
• She draws a pointed line from artistic misogyny (Picasso) to contemporary abuses of power (Trump, Polanski, Allen, Louis CK, Cosby), refusing to "separate the art from the artist."
  • ("I can draw a straight line from Pablo Picasso to Donald Trump by way of Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Louis CK, Bill Cosby. They're all cut from the same fucking cloth and I'm sick of it. These men control our stories." – Hannah Gadsby, 19:59–20:11)
  • ("I will not separate the man from the art. And even if I did, the shit sticks." – Hannah Gadsby, 20:40)

Navigating Problematic Influences (21:11–21:40)

• Gadsby admits her favorite comic was Bill Cosby, but once his crimes were known, she easily let go of the artist himself—though she can't ignore the influence.

8. Telling Your Own Story and Its Impact (21:48–23:12)

• Gadsby discusses reliving trauma through performance and the neurological and emotional cost of her vulnerable storytelling:
  • ("Yes, I am reliving trauma every night. And I'm not a trained performer, so I don't know how to do that, protecting myself ... I don't know what I've done to myself with this show. ... I've spoken to psychiatrists and people who, you know, research trauma and they don't know what I've done with this show." – Hannah Gadsby, 21:48)
• She notes a positive outcome: deeper connection with her audience, realizing that sharing her unique story resonates with many.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On comedy’s structure:
  "A joke simply needs two things, a setup and a punch. ... I manipulate it, like I make you tense, then I make you laugh over and over again and you're like, oh, thank you. I was feeling a bit tense. But fucking hell, guys, I'm making you tense over and over again. This is an abusive relationship."
  —Hannah Gadsby, 12:18–13:10

• On refusing self-humiliation:
  "I've built a career out of humiliating myself and putting myself down ... I have decided I don't want to do that anymore."
  —Hannah Gadsby, 09:15

• On trauma in comedy:
  "Comedy doesn't [provide catharsis]. We stop short, set up, punchline, beginning, middle, there it sits. ... It deals with tension, hence it feeds trauma."
  —Hannah Gadsby, 14:33–15:27

• On art and misogyny:
  "I can draw a straight line from Pablo Picasso to Donald Trump ... They're all cut from the same fucking cloth and I'm sick of it. These men control our stories. ... I will not separate the man from the art. And even if I did, the shit sticks."
  —Hannah Gadsby, 19:59–20:40

• On vulnerability and audience reaction:
  "In this show, I subverted that. I used a callback to drop them into a huge hole and not give them the laugh. ... And also I was getting really horrific heckles ... always after I just told my audience that I'd been sexually assaulted."
  —Hannah Gadsby, 16:40–17:25

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Summer Music Festival Overview: 00:32–07:29
• Who is Hannah Gadsby? & Nanette’s Challenge: 07:29–09:15
• Gadsby on Self-Deprecation & Identity: 09:15–11:07
• Autism and Emotional Comedy: 11:07–11:37
• Deconstructing Stand-up: 12:18–15:32
• Acceptability of Jokes: 15:32–16:18
• Performing Trauma / Heckling: 16:18–18:49
• Authority, Art, and the MeToo Movement: 18:49–21:11
• Problematic Influences: 21:11–21:40
• Personal Impact of Storytelling: 21:48–23:12

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Tone and Style

• The episode balances irreverence and deep seriousness, shifting from light festival chatter to intense, meaningful critique.
• Gadsby’s observations are quick-witted, unflinching, and often laced with dark humor, while Nussbaum provides thought-provoking, empathetic counterpoints.

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Takeaways

Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette is not just a comedy show. It's a pointed examination of stand-up’s limitations, a challenge to its traditions, and an exploration of the costs and necessity of vulnerability. Gadsby's willingness to lay bare her trauma and critique the mechanics—and ethics—of humor signals a significant moment in the evolution of comedy and cultural storytelling.

(For maximum impact, listeners are encouraged to watch Nanette, now available on Netflix.)

Transcript

[Emily Nussbaum]

Floor 38.

[Hannah Gadsby]

It's very exciting to be having a.

[Amanda Petrusich]

Conversation with someone when they have that.

[Hannah Gadsby]

Revelation.

[David Remnick]

That maybe looking at this case could be an interesting process. Okay.

[Narrator/Producer]

From One World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

[David Remnick]

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

[Amanda Petrusich]

Coachella backstage at Lollapalooza, Pitchfork Music Festival.

[David Remnick]

This song is for you.

[Amanda Petrusich]

Bonnaroo, Chicago, Urbana Cineos.

[David Remnick]

Summer means, among other things, outdoor music festivals all across the country, by the hundreds in every genre you could possibly name, where thousands of mostly young people pack their sweaty selves onto huge fields to listen to band after band after band and all the while trying to avoid heatstroke. Keeping up on top of the summer festivals is a job for music critic Amanda Petrusich. And better her than me. You know what's nice at a concert? A chair. A nice chair.

[Amanda Petrusich]

I like. A freshly mixed martini. I like.

[David Remnick]

Well, even a cold beer would be just the thing for me.

[Amanda Petrusich]

It's the bathrooms, it's the porta potties, like the plastic kind of coffin effect.

[David Remnick]

And also the kind of sweat box aspect mixing well. It's just a great combination.

[Amanda Petrusich]

I don't know why people aren't inviting us to their festivals. Because we're a great time.

[David Remnick]

Now, Amanda, despite all this propaganda from me, you've come to tell us about some, some great festivals this summer, if anyone is still where and when and how.

[Amanda Petrusich]

My first pick is called Pickathon, and it is a festival that's held every summer in Happy Valley, Oregon, just outside of Portland. The UK Independent newspaper has called it the most hipster event on the planet. So there the stages kind of double as art installations. Every attendee gets one plate and one cup that you reuse for the entire weekend.

[David Remnick]

So this is not Beyonce topping the bill.

[Amanda Petrusich]

No, I mean one of the cool things or another cool thing I should say about Pickathon is that most of these festival, the big summer festival lineups, they're all the same. It's like the same sort of big money making acts. Pickathon is great in that I think the curation's a little more idiosyncratic. It's a roots music festival, so they tend to be sort of folksier bands or bands with whom you can sort of have a real kind of intimate connection. It's a little bit less spectacle and maybe a little smaller, even though the festival itself is pretty big.

[David Remnick]

It sounds fun.

[Amanda Petrusich]

Yeah, I hope so. But there are two artists playing this year that I'm super excited about, both of whom are Pickathon veterans. And the first is a folk band from Toronto called the Weather Station. So why don't we listen to a little bit?

[G]

There was a time you put your head on the small of my back. I was surprised that you touched me like that, but there in your head.

[Hannah Gadsby]

Was a current of life.

[G]

I could hardly stand a stace to that. I didn't imagine if I did, I made some joke of it. It was strange how I could feel so sane. So flame you out.

[Amanda Petrusich]

We were listening to Tamara Lindemann singing. She was a television star in Canada prior to kind of dedicating herself to music full time. But I like that her voice is sort of delicate. It's vulnerable. But she has a real edge to her, too. And her lyrics, I think, can be. They're really sort of. Sort of sharply observed and interesting.

[David Remnick]

Who else is playing an organ?

[Amanda Petrusich]

The second is a band of Tuareg musicians from Mali called Tanariwen. It's really sort of mesmeric and beautiful, and for me, they're the kind of band that you actually want to hear outside under the stars with a zillion other people around.

[David Remnick]

Okay, so we've left Oregon. Where are we going now?

[Amanda Petrusich]

My second pick will surely get me accused of collusion, and my accusers will be right, because I've written for Pitchfork for many years. And my second pick is the Pitchfork Music Festival.

[David Remnick]

That's fair enough.

[Amanda Petrusich]

Which is in Grant park in Chicago in July. But I will say I think the lineup this year is extraordinary. In particular, I'm incredibly excited about a young singer and songwriter from West London named Niloufer Yanya. She's released three EPs, has yet to release her debut record, Throw it all.

[G]

Away for you, just like you asked me.

[Amanda Petrusich]

But I think she makes this sort of nonchalant but really deeply felt guitar pop that's sort of heavy and beautiful. And she's only playing a handful of US States. Summer, she's opening for Fleet Foxes. The Pitchfork Music Festival is one of them.

[Hannah Gadsby]

I'm getting tired of your D.

[G]

You just don't stop.

[Amanda Petrusich]

Pitchfork also has Lauryn Hill and Chaka Khan on Sunday night, so it's gonna be, I think, a pretty epic weekend. I am afraid my last pick is gonna scare you off because it's a little New Agey and I'm afraid you're gonna make fun of me a little.

[David Remnick]

Windham Hill a bit.

[Amanda Petrusich]

Yes, it is. But I promise you, no. No crystals, no tinctures, no scarves. My third pick is a concert series called Sonic Seasonal, which takes place at the Chestnut Hill Quaker Meeting House in Philadelphia, which is also the home to a James Turrell sky space. So there is a lovely light insulation in this space. And they book a different artist for every season of the year. And the summer booking is a harpist named Mary Lattimore. Just released her fourth record, I'm There.

[David Remnick]

So when Joanna Newsom brought the harp back into pop music, I was so dubious and she's a kind of genius. So bring it up.

[Amanda Petrusich]

I think that you will dig what Mary's doing too. It's, you know, it's a harp, but she's, you know, she does some kind of strange and difficult and provocative things with it. It's, it's not just all sort of, you know, hotel lobby, cocktail reception. And I think in this space it will be really, really beautiful.

[David Remnick]

Amanda, thank you so much.

[Amanda Petrusich]

Thank you so much for having me.

[David Remnick]

Staff writer Amanda Petrusich recommending Sonic Seasonal in Philadelphia, the Pitchfork Festival in Chicago, and Pickathon in Oregon. I'm David Remnick and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. The comedian Hannah Gadsby is very big in Australia. She's a headliner at the Melbourne Comedy Festival and she's a regular at the International Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Gatsby is about to become a very big deal in America with a special on Netflix called Nanette. Nanette is a full length comedy show and at the same time, a critique of stand up comedy that's serious and even profound. The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum went to see Nanette performed in New York and she says that Gatsby had her audience laughing and crying and sometimes dead silent.

[Emily Nussbaum]

I first saw Hannah Gadsby in a fantastic Australian television show called Please Like Me. In it, she played a depressed but intensely charming young woman named Hannah, a character who was based a little bit on her and a little bit on Hannah's work as a standup comedian. She's developed a new hour long stand up show pretty much every year. Hannah's latest show is something very different. It's a masterful critique of standup comedy and it's a strikingly relevant presentation and a challenging one for audiences in the age of MeToo. It's also hilarious and it might make you cry.

[Hannah Gadsby]

I've built a career out of humiliating myself and putting myself down in order to seek permission to speak, to take up space in the world. And I have decided I don't want to do that anymore. I will not do that. Anymore, not to myself.

Oh, thank you.

I mean, don't worry, I'm not starting a rally.

I'll finish the show as a comedy.

But thank you.

[Emily Nussbaum]

Hannah's show is very carefully structured, doing different things to the audience at different points, soothing them, making them tense, engaging them, shocking them. There are stories that weave through the show. They start out as jokes, and Gatsby gradually unfolds them like a paper fortune teller to reveal that they aren't joke. They're very serious stories about prejudice, power and assault. But they're never polemical or simply pedantic. They have complicated, unsettling things to say about the kinds of relationships that people have with one another. Hannah told me that early on in her career, her outsider status in many different ways helped her to be funny.

[Hannah Gadsby]

I'm a very difficult human to categorize. Like, I'm a larger woman from Tasmania, which is the small state in Australia, and I'm a lesbian. And these come with stereotypes that I subvert. You know, Tasmanians are supposed to be stupid, but I'm quite cerebral, so I don't play to that. And then also with my being overweight, I don't. I'm not jolly, I don't make fun of my weight. And then lesbian, which means you're very angry. This is when I started particularly. I mean, of course, that's opened up a lot more and I'm quite a gentle sensitive, so. So that really, you know, helped me early in my career because, you know, when you disrupt, that's instant tension. So that's actually handy. But as my career evolved, it became a real block.

[Emily Nussbaum]

Right.

[Hannah Gadsby]

And ultimately what this show is, and I don't say it in the show at all, I don't make any reference to it at all, but essentially this show is about having autism and a late diagnosis. And so instead of saying this is what I have, I decided to show what this brain can do, which is a real clear acknowledgement of how emotion works and how I feel it.

[Emily Nussbaum]

It's really fascinating because I actually was thinking that that is one of the most powerful things about the show, is that I've seen cerebral comedy shows and I've seen emotive ones, and it is both a cerebral and a deeply emotional show. And that combination is a very potent thing. And one of the things that's just beautiful in the show is that you explain the limits of stand up while you're doing stand up. And so you do this kind of seductive magician revealing their trick thing. So you make the audience self conscious of the power that goes back and forth. So we're gonna play just a little clip of a section of the show in which you talk about how comedy works, how jokes work.

[Hannah Gadsby]

Let me tell you what a joke is. If I boil it down to its absolute bare components.

A joke simply needs two things, a setup and a punch. That's all it needs. And it works in the same way as a question and answer. You ask a question, the anticipation is the tension, and the answer diffuses the tension. But with a joke, the answer is a surprise. So you laugh. I wasn't expecting that. There you go, lesson over. It's an easy job.

I'll be replaced.

No, everybody will miss me. But what a joke is in this situation is a question that I've just artificially inseminated with tension. And then. And that's all I do. Like I manipulate it, like I make you tense, then I make you laugh over and over again and you're like, oh, thank you. I was feeling a bit tense. But fucking hell, guys, I'm making you tense over and over again. This is an abusive relationship.

[Emily Nussbaum]

I love that part because it's a very deep insight, but it also has this dirty joke in it. Your bigger point that you're making, though, is that there's something harmful about jokes, and there's something harmful specifically about stopping at the punchline. Like the perpetual stopping at the punchline. Can you describe a bit what you think that harm is?

[Hannah Gadsby]

It's the harm of the joke is the only reason to speak. The point is only to make people laugh. And that troubled me after a while because I've always told stories. And that whole idea that laughter is the best medicine is not what I believe in. I believe laughter is the honey that sweetens the medicine story. Really, it allows you to listen to the story. Yeah.

[Emily Nussbaum]

Here you're talking about storytelling as a psychological tool, one we use to understand our own experiences by turning them into narratives.

[Hannah Gadsby]

And it's about also the live experience, because stand up comedy has the potential to be such an amazing cultural gift because it is one of the rare occasions where a group of strangers get to sit in a room sharing an experience. And I think that is a very potent human thing to have. But I really think, I really am passionately concerned that story gets downplayed and.

Dismissed, because essentially what art is, any art, it's not special, it's story. And stories are brilliant and they're wonderful and they're so important. But the story really does, in the traditional sense, need three a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the end, the third part is so important. And that.

That is what elevates you.

That's where catharsis lives. That's where hindsight sits.

That's where you get to look back.

Through a narrative with the perspective, wisdom, and experience of someone other than yourself. Comedy doesn't do that. We stop short, set up, punchline, beginning, middle, there it sits. And there's a very good reason it's called a punchline. It's because it deals with tension, hence it feeds trauma. We need tension in the room in order to get a laugh. But then we don't sort it out after. We just leave it there. This is why. This is like all these comedians going up and down the country, triggering people and getting all confused. It's like, what?

Aww.

It's like, yeah, because you just keep saying the same thing and it hurts.

[Emily Nussbaum]

So there's an ongoing debate about what is and what is not an acceptable joke. For instance, is a joke about rape ever actually funny? Is it okay to make a genocide gag? Chris Rock has this idea that if people laugh, it means it's funny. Like, you disagree with that? I would assume I do, yeah.

[Hannah Gadsby]

I've been in the audiences and I've laughed at horrific things. I've also stood side of stage while comedians are doing material I find absolutely horrific, making people believe violence against women is funny. And I hear audiences laughing, and I don't think that they would want to. You know, you can make anyone laugh if you make them tense enough because they want to get rid of the tension.

[Emily Nussbaum]

About 20 minutes into Nanette, the show shifts and you tell personal stories on stage. A lot of it has to do with painful and traumatic personal experiences. I was wondering how it felt on stage for you when you were first forming the show to have people crying or silent. Like, what did. You're a person who's used to getting laughs. Like, what was that like for you as a performer?

[Hannah Gadsby]

Strictly. What I was doing there is I was using one of the best tools in a particularly longer form comedy show, and that's a callback, and it works on the premise of a shared joke in comedy. Often I do. That's what I do. Like, I, you know, work through an hour's stand up and eventually we have shared jokes, and I love that they make an average joke brilliant. In this show, I subverted that. I used a callback to drop them into a huge hole and not give them the laugh. So to go against my instinct was really incredibly hard, to not break the tension. Real palpable silence is in the show. And my instinct as a comic is to make people feel better and make them laugh. So that was difficult in the first. And also I was getting really horrific heckles in the first.

[Emily Nussbaum]

I was wondering, did people heckle you?

[Hannah Gadsby]

Yeah, because now there's no room because it's really tight now. But when I first was doing it, there was a lot of room. The structure was different and, you know, it was always guys and always after I just told my audience that I'd been sexually assaulted. Always at that point.

[Emily Nussbaum]

That's amazing to me.

[Hannah Gadsby]

Yeah. And so then I'd get mansplay. That's interesting.

[Emily Nussbaum]

I have to say, having seen the show, which is a very like. And you really do have control over the audience. Like, you sort of critique the control back and forth. So people would shout cruel, insulting things to you.

[Hannah Gadsby]

So this has evolved. Has evolved pretty much out of that because I'm like, well, I don't want this to happen. I can't keep doing this show if this is going to happen. So I learned from that. But it was really devastating because when I do that, when I am genuinely vulnerable and it is violence, it felt like violence to get heckled at those moments. But I think I really learnt from that and was like, gosh, that is violence and that's what comedy promotes. And so it really drove the show toward a more technical show because I wanted to show people what that is, that violence and what it feels like.

[Emily Nussbaum]

Well, you're obviously an extremely technically adroit standup comic. Are there specific skills that you've picked up from doing this different kind of show?

[Hannah Gadsby]

No, this is a showcase, almost. What's interesting about the show is I'm high status. I've never been that in a show, but I discovered that voice doing. I had to do a spin off at some festivals where I do comedy art lectures. I've done one on the Virgin Mary, the one on the nude and modular.

[Emily Nussbaum]

Just to clarify, you have an art history background.

[Hannah Gadsby]

Yes, yes, yes. Sorry, but. And when I did those shows, I discovered I was more. Had more authority. I could talk about interesting things and there wasn't that resistance going, where's my laugh? Which you get in comedy. So that's. This is the first comedy show that I've played. High, higher status and.

[Emily Nussbaum]

And authoritative in that.

[Hannah Gadsby]

Yeah. Whereas before I would just be. You know, this is actually a great.

[Emily Nussbaum]

Part for us to play this other clip that is actually partially about art and partially about an incredibly timely subject, sexual trauma, misogyny, art and the me Too movement.

[Hannah Gadsby]

Honestly, I can draw a straight line.

From Pablo Picasso to Donald Trump by.

Way of Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Louis ck, Bill Cosby. They're all cut from the same fucking.

Cloth and I'm sick of it.

These men control our stories. They control our stories, yet they have a diminishing connection to their own humanity. What the fuck are we doing? Hindsight is a gift. Unwrap it. I keep getting told, just separate the man from the art. You've got to separate the man from the art. All right, grow up, calm down, don't get emotional. It's art. You gotta separate the man from the art. How about I don't? I will not separate the man from the art. And even if I did, the shit sticks.

[Emily Nussbaum]

See, I gotta say, I loved this part of the show. It was also the part that, because I'm an arts critic, was the most challenging to me because it is the thing that I have been wrestling so much in the people who've influenced me, the people that I've written about. I have my own ambivalent relationship. Are there artists that are basically like shitty guys who've done bad things that are important influences on you? What do you do with that stuff once you don't separate it?

[Hannah Gadsby]

I believe, you know, art is important. I don't believe artists are important as individuals. My favourite comedian's been Bill Cosby, always. He's funny. I like his rhythm. I liked what he talked about. But I found it very easy to let go of him. Very easy. I don't feel easy listening to his comedy anymore. But I'd be lying if I said it didn't influence me, but I let go of the man.

[Emily Nussbaum]

That makes a lot of sense. Has telling your own story every night changed how you see your story?

[Hannah Gadsby]

Yes, I am reliving trauma every night. And I'm not a trained performer, so I don't know how to do that, protecting myself. But because it's such a vulnerable show for me, I don't know what I've done to myself with this show. Like, I've spoken to psychiatrists and people who, you know, research trauma and they don't know what I've done with this show. Reliving trauma over and over again. There's a fair chance I've done some neurological rewiring and that's a part of a longer game in the com in my comedy career anyway. Doing comedy, and particularly the longer form hour long shows has meant that I've interrogated my own story. I needed to find a better, you know, hindsight, you can't change what's happened, you can't repress what's happened, but you can find a more constructive hindsight. But also the added bonus is what I felt is that I'm more connected to the world than I've ever been, because my idiosyncratic story, I thought was going to sell me off into the margins. But so many different types of people have connected into different parts of that show that it's actually been very constructive in that in a broader sense. And that's what doing this show has done for me. Absolutely.

[David Remnick]

Comedian Hannah Gatsby talking with the New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum. Gatsby's show Nanette, premieres on Netflix this week. I'm David Remnick. And that's it for today. Thanks for being with us. And if you've enjoyed the show, I just want to remind you you can subscribe to the podcast and catch up on any anything you missed. See you next time.

[Narrator/Producer]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill Deboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, Mytha Le Rau and Stephen Valentino, with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Michelle Moses, Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherna Endowment Fund.