Although the show was written as we were coming out of lockdown,Gadsby didn’t want to dwell on that experience;she has gone back to her storytelling roots to create it,and touring it through North America this year has been a joy. “It’s doing its job,it’s putting a good feeling in the room that it’s in.”
As revealed in hilarious fashion in her memoirTen Steps to Nanette,the world changed for Gadsby when her revolutionary show landed on Netflix back in 2018. “My life was thrown into the chaos of the new,and much bigger. Then all of a sudden,the whole world had a pandemic and the whole world changed,so coming out the other side of that I feel very disoriented because my life is so profoundly different,and also the world is so profoundly different. This show I’m using as a way of making sense of a new reality.”
The reaction toNanette was massive:all of a sudden,she was in with the A-crowd. At a party at Eva Longoria’s house,Janelle Monae and Jodie Foster wandered over to say hi and Jennifer Aniston asked to meet her. “It felt like I was in a zoo. I would have called myself a really successful comic before all of this,so it wasn’t like I felt like I was failing … What threw me for a loop was famous people knew who I was.“
Along the way,there was a public stoush with comedian Dave Chappelle,who said she wasn’t funny,and who she later described as having an “emotionally stunted partial world view”,and then Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos.
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How is all that sitting these days,I wonder,given bothNanette and her more recent showDouglas are available to watch on the streaming giant. The Netflix thatNanette entered is a different Netflix to that which exists now,she argues. “I’m a bit sad that my work has to sit side by side with overpaid transphobic shit. But it’s an algorithm right,algorithms,they’re not focused on exploration or potential of new creativity. They double down on what already exists;that is just what it is. As a creator,I can’t sink the Titanic on my own but,you know,I’ll make it cold for them,” she says with a sly giggle. “It’s the beast. As a creator,I’ll make a stand in so many different ways … I’m choosing to do it by doing my job,just working. I don’t feel that being a voice in direct opposition is constructive because that way the toxic voices then get to control the conversation.”