the woman who showed up to a party in black
by
Douglas Messerli
Hannah
Gadsby (writer and performer) Douglas / 2020
Yesterday
I watched, with great joy and out-loud laughing, Hannah Gadsby’s second U.S. comedic
special, Douglas. It may not quite be at the same level of her
self-deprecating previous Netflix release, Nanette; and even she jokes
that had she known how popular the first US work had been—in Australia and
elsewhere she’s done 8 other comedic presentations—she might have not packaged
all her suffering, mostly from homophobic oppression, into one work, but
perhaps stretched it out into a duo or trio. But Douglas is still a
superb work. And the reviewer for The Guardian argues, this work “blazes
with well-earned confidence,…that hitches up her crusading, patriarchy-bashing
humor to great jokes, meticulous set-building—and a new cause.
That new cause, connected with the fact
that in 2015 Gadsby was diagnosed in high-functioning autism, links up to her
wonderful crusade against anti-vaccination advocates.
Obviously, this is a longstanding comic
device since when the “show” actually begins she can surprise her audience all
over again with the clever way in which interweaves their expectations with the
actual jokes, asides, stories, and, in this case, incorporating pictures of
Renaissance art.
The pot-au-feu that Gadsby creates—in
which from moment to moment she spins from short tales to one-liners, lectures,
personal revelations, and a direct mocking of her audiences, made palatable in
this case because of her own self-deprecation, and even hate-baiting (early on
she warns her audience not to take the bait)—had made some, particularly males,
to truly hate her kind of comic performances, or least raised a great deal of
confusion among her critics.
Yet that mix of the high, low, comic,
and serious commentary, all delivered with a truly knowledgeable and
intelligent wit, is precisely what those of us who love her work so enjoy her
performance and, I’d argue, even her persona. Without being disparaging, I’d
suggest that Gadsby is like a bigger-than-life aunt who helps to educate us,
make us laugh, and scold us when we need it, while letting us know that she
truly loves us—the kind of aunt we’d all love to have (I did).
Indeed, her guide to her program,
warning us of the possible pitfalls along way, is a kind of act of love. I’m
going to make fun of Americans at first she tells us, but don’t take it
seriously. Mostly that opening “act” deals with the ridiculous differences
between the Aussie language and words Americans use: “petrol,” a liquid for
example in Australia as opposed to our “gas,” something that not liquid at all;
while a “fanny” in the US is the bum, in Australia it means the lower front of
woman, so that as a child when she read an American book about children riding
down hill on their “fannies,” she simply could not comprehend the act! Yet she
loves the Southern pronoun “Y’ll” since its sexuality is neutral.
This leads directly into one of her best
stories. While walking her dog Douglas in the park, a man approaches her
suggesting that a smile needs less energy than a frown, she claiming that her
face was simply in neutral. His dog incidentally, a whippet, has unwanted shoes
of his four paws.
The
man then asks her dog’s name to which she responds Doug. The stranger laughs,
finally insisting that it was great name, to which the now self-admitted somewhat
argumentative Gadsby disagrees, suggesting it’s a terrible name. I’ll leave out
some of the details, and of course, the comedians telling of this story is
truly what makes it funny. But it ends up with a lie, that she named her dog
after the Pouch of Douglas, a small empty and unreachable space in
women between the anal cavity and the vagina, named after the discoverer of this
emptiness by Scottish man midwife Dr. James Douglas, which leads into her critique that only men name
everything.
But even if Gadsby belongs in this
tradition, her art is all her own, a contemporary and original talent that you
can watch over and over (I did, laughing almost as heartily as I did the first
time).
Los
Angeles, June 5, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (June 2020).
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