Comedian Hannah Gadsby Is Giving Us One Last Show Before She Quits

If you’ve seen the gay creative genius that is Josh Thomas’ Please Like Me, then you’ll be aware that comedian Hannah Gadsby is a gift to the universe. On Please Like Me, she plays Josh’s Mum’s fellow nut-house (their words, not ours!) patient, and is totally coincidentally also named Hannah. PLM Hannah is a depressed lesbian with a bone dry sense of humour and some of the quickest quips in the show.

What you might know is that Hannah Gadsby exists outside of Please Like Me. In fact, she exists outside of it so much that she’s now 39 and she’s been doing stand-up comedy for so long that she’s announced that after this year, she’ll retire from the comedy scene.

But not without one last round of self-described ‘swansong’ shows. Gadsby has won a bloody Barry Award (i.e. Australia’s comedy version of an Oscar) for the show that she’ll be touring, Nanette, and she’ll be blessing us with it in Sydney and Melbourne this September/October, and November, respectively.

Gadsby’s show unveils the disingenuousness that lies behind feel-good proclamations to “just be yourself!” Gadsby knows from experience that this is folly and that all the cool kids are in fact normal. She always dreamt of being a cool kid but she had to accept that, just like her childhood dream of being a dog, normal isn’t possible for her. Over the past year, Gadsby decided to embrace solitude, determined to see what harvest might come from nurturing her left-field life.

This is a show about learning to thrive as “not normal”. Gadsby’s year of gentle exile not only saw her harvest silly projects like making homemade jam and adopting a “blue clothes only” policy, it gave her the strength she badly needed when she observed with increasing horror the same-sex marriage debates that began to hit all the same sickening notes she’d heard as a teenager in the 1990s when Tasmania resisted the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

Don’t miss your chance to be spellbound by one of Australia’s most applauded comedians, and the inner workings of Hannah’s unique mind.

Nanette comes to the Sydney Opera House from 27 September to 8 October, and to Melbourne Arts Centre on November 24 and 25.