What an innocent, iconic biscuity treat for many Australians a Tim Tam is. In Hannah Gadsby’s latest, excellent show, Woof! (Abrons Arts Center, to Oct 27), prepare for that sweet innocence to be left in undignified crumbs, thanks to a brilliantly disgusting joke involving a discarded packet of Tim Tams and something, let’s say if you were cleaning a hotel room, that you never want to find on the floor.
At moments during Woof!—as in Gadsby’s other well-known shows, Nanette and Douglas—the laughs are from such familiar comic riffs with a skillful build and then a ricocheting set of payoffs. Then, in other moments, where the focus turns inwards to matters of identity and grief, or outwards to the state of a world on so many edges, the humor comes spiked with moments of room-stilling seriousness and harder whirls of thought and nuance. Then, with a verbal flash or insouciant irreverence, Gadsby subverts that seriousness with a gasper of a joke.
Here, they talk (again) about gender and the act of transitioning—yet not for Gadsby a boilerplate coming out narrative but something far cleverer that defies expectations and invites more questions. For Gadsby, art and confession are very personal detective work, and the case is eternally ongoing.
Gadsby is both a wonderful joke and storyteller—a tilt of the head, a side-eye, a pause can add to moments of extended hilarity—while adept at threading stories and jokes with moments of sharp self-reflection and confession. In this show, at certain moments, they insist that these moments are just between us.
This request for shared secrecy is said seriously, and also with a twinkle, because the real skill of Gadsby’s comedy is its simultaneous marriage and clash of public and private, confession and reticence, comedy and seriousness, and the butting up of the very real with the surreal and whimsical. Their tone matches this multi-textured rollercoaster—thoughtful, caustic, very serious, loud, irreverent. Each story, each gag, is like its own magical mystery tour. Where will it end up?
Those who saw Nanette will recall the show’s tonal change where they spoke, furiously and with precision, about their experience of gendered violence; in this show, they talk about their father’s death and grief, of abortion laws, and of fighting with Netflix, of feeling a new and persistent problem with fame. The comfortable beds and luxuries are lovely, but what has it meant for Gadsby personally, their voice, their work, their life? Gadsby has said Woof! as a title is a reaction-meets-expression to a world keeling over into so much chaos.
Reflecting on Taylor Swift’s fame and global predominance, Gadsby not only confesses to not being much of a fan, but also sums Swift up as “a can of Coke masquerading as a sorority cult.” Gadsby has previously spoken of their own autism—here they talk of social media being the place where neurotypical people go to experience “the worst” of the condition.
“I’m going to be canceled by feminists,” they joke of how her humor may be received by women. “I don’t think there’s anything more feminist than being canceled by feminists.”
As with Nanette, Woof! is also an excavation of the meaning of comedy, the place of anger and seriousness in comedy, how a show is constructed, a self-questioning of what their humor, and the purpose of relating humor is, of what is being told to us and what is being withheld.
Gadsby does not traffic in wholesale confession; they will tell us a bold headline and then not the whole story. Gadsby trashes Netflix and what it has done to them, rather than for them. In such setups, the craft of Gadsby is evident: how jokes interact with stories; and how the traumatic and rawly felt can be made into jokes without lessening any of the story’s seriousness.
In Nanette, Gadsby spoke movingly about the interplay of punchlines and tension, and the need they have to tell their stories properly—beyond jokes, and beyond making themselves the subject of those jokes. In Woof!, whether that be about coming out, gender identity, the oppression of Netflix, or the meaning of whales, it means Gadsby has written and edited every word and sequence with care, despite the appearance of off-the-cuffedness. By deploying these words with such dazzling acuity Gadsby means to fight ignorance, stupidity, easy reads, dumb conclusions, and expected tropes. Accordingly, you listen to every word as—right in front of you—they bloom into so many laughs, gut-punch sighs, and vivid meanings.
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