Autism in Entertainment Returns With a Deep Dive Into Hannah Gadsby's Nannette

It only took me seven years to get around to writing about the most talked about comedy special of the last decade

The good lord blessed me with autism, ADHD, and bipolar 2. I have three gremlins constantly rampaging through my brain, wreaking havoc and engaging in elaborate acts of self-sabotage.

If my brain were not my worst enemy, and occasional friend, I would have written about Hannah Gadsby’s Peabody and Emmy-winning special, Nanette, in 2018, when it was the subject of rapturous praise and culture-wide debate.

Instead, I waited seven years to experience the most acclaimed comedy special of the late teens, when it was a period piece set in the distant past rather than something everyone was talking about.

Early in Nanette, Gadsby quips that it is not a good time to be a straight white man. This observation marks the special as the product of a very specific cultural context, when the avalanche of revelations that followed in the wake of the #MeToo movement inspired a global reckoning that briefly inspired men to look inward and examine their role in perpetuating sexism on an individual level.

They did not like that! They REALLY did not like that!

That seems like a VERY long time ago. It’s now a terrible time to be anything but a straight white male. In just one illustration of the current hellscape, the Secretary of Defense, who won his position by having a strong jawline and saying nice things about Donald Trump on television, belongs to a Christian Nationalist church that does not think that women should vote or hold leadership positions. They also want to repeal the 19th Amendment.

When I logged onto Netflix to finally watch Nanette, a mere seven years after its release, I was confronted with Tony “Kill Tony” Hinchcliffe’s special.

Hinchcliffe, you might remember, was the subject of intense controversy when he compared Puerto Rico to a floating island of garbage while opening for Donald Trump at a rally at Madison Square Garden. The press adorably and delusionally imagined that this would hurt Trump and Hinchcliffe because his supporters would find racism and tasteless jokes repellent.

Instead, Trump promised to abuse his power to enact revenge on his enemies, which proved to be a horrifyingly popular platform. A clearly senile and vengeance-crazed Trump defeated an infinitely more qualified woman of color with the help of a brigade of bro comedians, led by Joe Rogan, who thought that Trump had swag (and also would appear on their podcasts), and that Harris seemed like a joyless scold.

During a 2021 live performance, Dave Chappelle, Netflix’s richly compensated golden boy, ranted, “To the transgender community, I am more than willing to give you an audience, but you will not summon me. I am not bending to anybody's demands. And if you want to meet with me, I would be more than willing to, but I have some conditions: First of all, you cannot come if you have not watched my special from beginning to end. You must come to a place of my choosing and at a time of my choosing. And thirdly, you must admit that Hannah Gadsby is not funny.”

I’m not sure whether the entire transgender community agreed to Chappelle’s terms and were granted an audience with a man who has destroyed his legacy through bigotry.

Chappelle has used his tremendous power and influence to inflame the transphobia that powered Trump’s reelection.

Men were so angry about being asked to look inward and examine their role in perpetuating sexism that they elected a proud misogynist and probable sex criminal who more or less made acknowledging and fighting sexism, transphobia, and anti-black racism a fireable offense at best and a crime at worst.

Seven years can be a very long time. It can be an eternity. I wish that I could journey back in time to 2018, when things were still terrible, but nowhere near as nightmarish as they would become.

“Nobody here is leaving this room a better person,” promises Gadsby early in Nanette. It’s a joke that gets a laugh rather than the truth.

I can see how well-meaning progressives might view attending a Gadsby show live as an act of allyship, as a good deed as well as an entertaining night out.

Roger Ebert famously said that “movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” The same can be said of stand-up comedy that comes from a place of authenticity and honesty.

For sixty-nine minutes, Gadsby allows us to see the world through her eyes, to experience what it’s like to be a non-binary Australian lesbian with autism and ADHD, and PTSD.

I’m writing about Nannette because of Gadsby’s autism, and, to a lesser extent, their ADHD, so it’s worth noting that at no point does Gadsby talk about being neurodivergent. The words “autism” and “ADHD” are never uttered, even though Gadsby, like me, received a late-in-life diagnosis of AuDHD.

Though Gadsby does not reference neurodivergence specifically, it informs her depiction of life as an outsider as inherently difficult and exhausting.

It’s hard to be different. The difficulty level increases exponentially based on how different you are. As a straight white man, my life is less difficult than Gadsby’s, but more difficult than that of a neurotypical caucasian heterosexual man.

Gadsby makes us feel their pain, righteous rage, and existential exhaustion, but first, they make us laugh. They’re able to take us to dark, emotional, raw, and revelatory places precisely because they’re so skilled at conventional stand-up comedy.

Seth Myers is credited with coining the phrase “clapter” to refer to the phenomenon of audiences clapping to convey their agreement with a comedian’s words rather than laughing reflexively because they’re amused.

When I wrote for The A.V. Club, readers would sometimes say that they liked my writing because they agreed with my reviews. That meant little to me because opinions are not important, particularly my own. I’m just one weird dude. What the hell do I know?

I don’t care if you agree with me; if my writing has value, it’s because I articulate that opinion in a funny, entertaining, informed, or convincing way.

There is a LOT of clapping in Nannette, but it’s not cheap veneration of empty agreement. It is, instead, born of appreciation rooted in the profundity of Gadsby’s material, the way she says things that stick with you because they are wise.

For example, Gadsby says that they won’t engage in self-deprecation because when a member of a marginalized group, or groups, does that, “it’s not humility, it’s humiliation.”

Nannette is edifying in myriad ways. Gadsby’s art history degree figures far more prominently than you would expect in an evening of stand-up comedy. She siezes upon Pablo Picasso as the epitome of predatory men who abuse their power and reputation to hurt vulnerable people.

This world of awful men includes Donald Trump, who is referenced throughout, and Bill Cosby, who was once Gadsby’s favorite comedian. That feels both bitterly ironic, since he turned out to be a monster masquerading as a saint, and appropriate, because he’s a storyteller like Gadsby. The crucial difference is that Cosby’s onstage stories never mentioned his double life as a prolific sex criminal. That was a key omission.

Gadsby is forever deconstructing their comedy in particular and stand-up comedy as a whole. They discuss how tension is at the center of comedy, with the essence of comedy being the balance between tension and release, set-up and punchline.

Post-modernism can have a distancing effect. That’s not true here. Gadsby offers an extended look into their creative process without taking away from the special’s intense, even overwhelming emotions.

I am currently editing the 22nd draft of The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about American movies that explore the art of filmmaking, so I view everything through that prism.

It’s given me another opportunity to write about Sullivan’s Travels, a timeless masterpiece that follows the same bold arc as Nannette.

Sullivan’s Travels writer-director Preston Sturges was arguably the funniest filmmaker of his generation. That gift is on full display during Sullivan’s Travels' first two acts, when its stubborn filmmaker protagonist, John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), leaves his pampered Hollywood existence in a doomed attempt to understand the lives of the downtrodden.

In its third act, Sturges does something bold. The funniest man in movies chooses not to be funny. The wittiest screenwriter in the business opted to forgo comedy and dialogue for an impressionistic, empathetic portrayal of life at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

The Great Gadsby makes a similarly audacious turn in the final ten to fifteen minutes of the special. She chooses not to be funny. She stops trying to get laughs and becomes deadly serious. Her voice quivers with righteous anger as she talks about being molested as a child, raped as a twenty-something, and beaten up by a homophobe enraged that they were hitting on his girlfriend.

It’s doubtful that Chappelle made it to the end of Gadsby’s special. That would require a degree of empathy and sensitivity he no longer possesses. But if he had, he might have noted that this part of the show is not funny because it is serious.

A few years ago, I re-read part of The Big Rewind, my 2009 memoir, for a column where I would revisit all my books. This proved to be one of the seemingly countless series of ambitious projects I never finished, or even began, because I have the attention span of a squirrel on cocaine and get distracted by life’s shiny objects. Fucking ADHD, man.

I was horrified by my desperate need to inject jokes where they were not needed or appropriate, in a bid to avoid depressing my readers with the truth. If I were to write The Big Rewind now, I would cut 90 percent of the jokes from it because my story and my pain were what mattered, not my creative insecurity and predilection towards shtick.

Gadsby seems to have had a similar epiphany. They understand that sometimes the best, most authentic way to create comedy is by eschewing jokes in favor of ruthless honesty.

In this closing stretch, Gadsby expresses vulnerability and strength, as well as strength through vulnerability. In one of the many lines from the special that I can't stop thinking about, Gadsby, “There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”

The world now feels broken. Gadsby’s transcendent, deeply humane special shows us that we can rebuild into something stronger, wiser, and more resilient.

It’s tempting to say that Nanette couldn’t possibly live up to the hype that greeted its release, but I spent the final fifteen minutes weeping.

Gadsby’s special made me laugh. It made me cry. It made me think. It made me sad because the world has devolved since Nanette.

Other than that, I didn’t have much of a response to Nanette. I found it to be man-hating and overrated.

In this bleak time, difference is punished harshly under the dubious grounds of fighting Woke and DEI, while homogeneity and conformity are being hailed as sane and right. The diversity and sensitivity that Gadsby correctly identifies as strengths are held in suspicion, if not outright contempt, by a thin-skinned majority that sees the successes and influence of minorities as an unforgivable insult that must be avenged by erasing them from the historical record.

Watching Nanette in 2025 was an intensely emotional, bittersweet experience. It’s the product of a more hopeful time, or at least one that wasn’t quite so soul-crushingly hopeless.

Life has gotten much harder for everyone different since then, but it’s gotten even harder for people like Gadsby, whose need for understanding and sensitivity is now inexplicably seen as an angry demand for control that must be denied at all costs before it destroys white, Christian heteronormative society with dangerous notions like compassion, empathy, and sensitivity.