Melbourne Comedy Festival

Hannah Gadsby brings their new show “Woof” to Melbourne Arts Centre for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Their star has risen well and truly since her show Nanette hit Netflix in 2018. Today, they grace the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine (AU/NZ edition) with the headline “Comedy’s enfant terrible is relishing their anti-hero era”.

As a newbie, it was a wonderful introduction to Gadsby’s fast-paced, quick-witted, intensely analytic humour, which brought out belly laughs galore. Snappy asides like bullet spray on the way to the main punchlines compounded the fun. I was surrounded by pre-Nanette die-hard fans, so there was a lot of love in the house. And I can see why—Gadsby is earnest, humble, intelligent, funny, vulnerable, honest, and a truth-teller.

They’ve worked hard to be where they are now. For someone who can go for weeks without speaking (they have autism and ADHD) and who says they are bad at everything in life, including having fun, they have certainly played their cards to their advantage. They say their only skill is to talk to a room full of strangers and not feel scared. But what they choose to say has been both strategic and a personal lifeline. Nanette deconstructed comedy and social norms derived from centuries of white male dominance at a time when Australia was debating the same-sex marriage plebiscite. For this, Gadsby bared their soul, and it was raw and confronting.

Interestingly, Gadsby has tried hard, in good faith, to like Taylor Swift. It hasn’t worked. They even used her as inspiration for their 2016 show, Dogmatic. Of course, they have major differences: Gadsby has a depth of intellectual engagement with their art form and uses it to subvert and confront. Their 2023 Picasso-blasting exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, It’s Pablomatic, is a case in point alongside Nanette. However, I can’t help but see some similarities: both use the power of story-telling and self-disclosure in their work, which fosters a high level of devotion in their predominantly female fan base; both live their lives in a way that encourages their fans to be unafraid to be themselves and in return, their fans care deeply about them and want to support them. But there is a vast contrast in their lived experience of otherness and, therefore, the depth of their fight.

Now, Gadsby has a global voice and has just launched a new Netflix comedy show, Gender Agenda, featuring seven gender-queer comedians from around the world. Being nouveau-riche means staying in posh hotels where the concierges don’t know how to respond to questions about doing your own laundry and the bathrooms have no toilet brush. Gadsby worries about becoming a rich arsehole, but I doubt that will happen – they take a spare travel toothbrush with them to clean up after themselves when a low roughage travel diet messes with their regularity.

“Woof” is a show about the worries that lead to anxiety. If you think the ending is a bit loose, well, that is the point. There is no closure, no easy answers. What happened to all those plastic dolls called Cabbage Patch Kids from the 80s/90s? Did they end up somewhere in a “Blair Witch style croquembouche”? Will Hannah Gadsby be able to enjoy swimming with a whale on her day off? Will their brain let them remember fun times as vividly as they remember a randomly defiled Tim Tam packet left for them to clean up when working as a hotel cleaner?

Enjoy this show where your host “takes all their worries and lays them out on stage in front of a darkened room full of strangers. It’s like group therapy, but the group is the therapist”. That’s us, but we don’t feel like strangers. So now Gadsby adds us to their list of worries, too, because therapists are all “f***ed in the head.”

“Woof” is playing until April 20 at the Melbourne Arts Centre Playhouse.

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