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In her 2017 show Nanette, Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby announced she was quitting comedy. The show won comedy awards at Melbourne International Comedy Festival (where it sold out and was extended multiple times), Adelaide Fringe and Edinburgh Fringe, as well as winning Australia's Helpmann Award for Best Comedy Performer. It toured internationally, with successful runs in London and New York City. In June 2018 Nanette premiered as a Netflix special, reaching a much wider audience. I saw the show twice in Melbourne, once in New York City and finally on Netflix.1 In the show, Gadsby argued that as a marginalized person – a gender-nonconforming lesbian from rural Tasmania – she was doing herself a disservice when she invited audiences to laugh at the self-deprecating humour on which she had built her career. Gadsby framed her decision to quit comedy partly as a problem of persona: her practice as a comedian was to take actual, sometimes traumatic, events from her life and turn them into jokes, which she described in the Melbourne iteration of Nanette as ‘half-told stories’. So framed, the problem with Gadsby's comic persona is the way it both presents and truncates her traumatic experience.
Nanette’s international run spanned Australia's Marriage Equality Law Postal Survey and subsequent legalization (September–December 2017), the international #MeToo movement against sexual assault sparked by allegations against American film producer Harvey Weinstein (October 2017 onward), Louis C.K.’s admission that sexual harassment allegations against him are true (November 2017), Bill Cosby's trial and subsequent conviction for sexual assault (April 2018), and Roseanne Barr's show's cancellation after she posted racist comments on Twitter (May 2018). Gadsby's show contributed to and benefited from a moment of special cultural attunement to the relationship between a performer's actions and their work, and our responsibilities as audiences to that work. Indeed, Nanette responds to this issue in a discussion of Picasso's affair with a seventeen-year-old girl when the artist was forty-five; in the show, Gadsby rejects the idea of separating the man from his art.2 Comedians’ close alignment with their onstage personas makes the relations between performers and their work particularly visible. Moreover, Gadsby positions herself in and against a tradition of comic self-deprecation during a contemporary moment when LGBTI performers...