‘I probably identify as “Grandma”’: Gadsby's comic persona

‘I built a career out of self-deprecating humor’, Gadsby says in Nanette. ‘Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It's not humility. It's humiliation’. Gadsby aligns her self-deprecating comic persona with actual deprecation of self. This resonates with John Limon's account of a comedian's ‘odd relation to … identity, caused by the indiscretion of role and reality, personality and character, having and being’.Footnote ⁹ For Limon, as for Gadsby, this is an abject relation. But the meaning of self-deprecation, like the relation between performer and persona, is variable. As Joanne R. Gilbert discusses in Performing Marginality, critics who condemn female comics’ use of self-deprecation often fail to consider ‘that self-deprecatory humor may be construed as cultural critique, and that comics who use self-deprecatory material do not necessarily believe themselves to be the personas they project onstage’.Footnote ¹⁰ As an example Gilbert gives American comedian Phyllis Diller, who told jokes about her flat-chestedness when in fact she had had breast-reduction surgery.Footnote ¹¹ In this way Diller introduced a gap between role and reality rather than collapsing them. We might also point to asexual American comedian Paula Poundstone, who is known for her self-deprecating style and gender-bending aesthetics (she performs in suits). Although her disinterest in sex has been a part of her act across her career, she does not present it as a problem to be solved. Instead, her self-mockery invites identification and connection, and audiences ‘laugh at the absurdity of the rules of normative adulthood’.Footnote ¹² Poundstone and Diller show the varied meanings and effects of self-deprecation. Gadsby's account of how her self-deprecating persona works thus illustrates one of Nanette’s central tensions: the persona is reductive, she tells us, because it reinforces her social marginalization and repeats her traumatic experiences in truncated joke form. But Gadsby's account of self-deprecation is itself reductive when she applies it to all marginal performers. Rather than ‘breaking comedy’, the feat with which Nanette has been credited, the show's laudable attempt to address mainstream audiences threatens to reinforce assumptions about identity and representation that limit stand-up's political and comic possibilities.Footnote ¹³

In Nanette Gadsby distances her persona from lesbian identity even as she discusses the pressure she feels to represent for LGBTI people. Gadsby acknowledges this tension in a section on ‘feedback’, such as the time an audience member approached her after a show to share her disappointment that there wasn't enough lesbian content. ‘I'd been on the stage the whole time’, Gadsby cracks, drawing a big laugh. The joke hinges on whether anything Gadsby says or does is necessarily ‘lesbian content’ by virtue of her sexuality and shows the pressures on out performers to represent for communities and identities to which they may have ambivalent relations. In a more wide-of-the-mark instance of such feedback, Gadsby describes a ‘letter’ she received on Facebook that stated, ‘You owe it to your community to come out as transgender’. ‘That was new information to me’, Gadsby tells the audience. ‘I don't identify as transgender … I don't think even lesbian is the right identity fit for me, I really don't. I may as well come out now. I identify … as tired’. Similarly, in a 2017 interview Gadsby distanced herself from ‘queer’ as an identity descriptor:

Gadsby's identification with grandmothers, often called nannas in Australia, sheds light on Nanette’s title. At the beginning of Nanette Gadsby frames the title as a failure, noting that shows slated for festival performance must be named before they have been written. Gadsby explains (at greater length in the Melbourne shows than in the later iterations) that she named the show after a prejudiced older woman who worked as a barista in a country petrol station in Australia, but she couldn't actually get enough material out of the woman to carry a show, so the title is incidental. But this is itself an instance of Gadsby's self-deprecation. If we see Nanette as referencing Gadsby's identification with grandmothers we can see in the show's title an ambivalent resistance to queer identity. But, seen in this way, the title also renders Gadsby an iteration of the homophobic barista, a problem to which she returns when she links the homophobia she internalized as a child to ‘forgetting’ to come out to her own grandmother. Nanette’s title thus captures and does not resolve the problems of persona and identification with which the show grapples.

Nanette comes closest to launching a new comic persona in moments that complicate and displace what identity is and show how representation works. ‘Where are the quiet gays?’ Gadsby asks in a section on the aesthetics and affects of pride. As a counterpoint to the loud colours of the pride flag and the exuberance of Sydney Mardi Gras, Gadsby presents her favorite sound: that of a teacup finding its place on a saucer. Gadsby's performed introversion and grandmotherly affinities are endearing aspects of her persona. But in spite of distancing herself from the ‘shouty, assertive’ colours of the pride flag, throughout Nanette Gadsby calls LGBTI folk ‘my people’ and ‘my community’, for whom she wants to do her best. At the same time, she positions herself as a not-very-representative specimen of lesbianism – ‘I don't “lesbian” enough’, she says in the show. Gadsby deploys such grammatical tensions and elisions between the ‘I’ and a category more than once. For example, the Melbourne iteration of the show – performed amidst Australia's toxic national plebiscite on marriage equality – contained an extended response to the ‘think-of-the-children’ rhetoric often invoked by the right to suggest that LGBTI adults will corrupt innocent young people. ‘I was a children’, Gadsby pointed out, noting the damage to queer and ‘gender-not-normal’ children caused by raising them in phobic and normative environments. In the first example – ‘I don't “lesbian” enough’ – Gadsby verbs a noun, showing or reminding the audience of the distinction between sex acts and identity by eliding them grammatically. (Gadsby reinforces the sex-act denotation of her verb ‘to lesbian’ with her follow-up comment, ‘I keep my hand in’.) In the second instance – ‘I was a children’ – Gadsby helps the audience hear that when people invoke ‘the children’ they inaccurately assume that children are heterosexual and gender-normative. The category of ‘the children’ summons a falsely representative child ideal. But the flip side of Gadsby's comment is itself a kind of normative universalism, insofar as she is emphasizing that we were all once children.

Despite Gadsby's resistance to identity categories, the more iterations of Nanette I saw, the more I felt that she was speaking to the mainstream in ways that shaped and limited its comic and political possibilities. Among the show's many tensions are that in wanting to do her best for her people, Gadsby often addresses herself to men, heterosexual people and ‘gender-normals’, and that in distancing herself from representativeness, she also espouses a reasonably homonormative politics. A good example is Gadsby's announcement near the start of the show that ‘homosexuality is clearly not a choice’. The context is a discussion of 1990s Tasmania, where those who ‘chose’ to be gay were expected to ‘pack your AIDS up into a suitcase and fuck off to Mardi Gras’. The story and the assurance that homosexuality is not a choice emphasize the cultural backwardness of 1990s Tasmania even as they strand the (Sydney, site of Mardi Gras, in the Netflix version) audience in a 1990s defence of homosexuality. What I find homonormative is Gadsby's use of the sort of defensive slogan one presents to one's proverbial homophobic uncle – ‘a mantra’, as Yasmin Nair writes, ‘that gives straight people an immediately legible way to affirm the right of queer people to exist’ and ‘reassures them that we are neither threatening nor unstable, and that we know our place as sexual minorities’.Footnote ¹⁵ There are, of course, homophobic uncles, queer people still must affirm the right to exist, and throwing out this particular mantra at the start of the show is an easy way to get an audience on side prior to the confrontational stance Gadsby will introduce later on. But the later sections never complicate this un-ironized truism, which collapses into popular discourse rather than shifting it. As a show that aligns performer and persona, Nanette’s embeddedness in the rhetoric of popular identity politics somewhat deflates Gadsby's stated resistance to the idea of sexuality as identity. This is not least apparent in Gadsby's criticisms of and addresses to straight white men. As Gadsby notes in the show, the phrase ‘straight white men’ immediately raises hackles because it means that they are now a ‘subcategory of human’ like everyone else. ‘You wrote the rules’, Gadsby tells the straight white men in the audience, ‘read them’.

Rape and punchlines: Nanette and Please Like Me

What rules of comedy does Gadsby break, change or reinforce in Nanette? To help me answer this question I will compare Gadsby's framing of how comedy works in the show to a scene from Please Like Me. Gadsby joined the cast of Please Like Me in Season 2, when protagonist Josh's mother, Rose (Debra Lawrance), gets admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Gadsby's character, like Josh Thomas's, shares her first name: she plays Hannah, another patient at the hospital. Thomas has been vocal about the semi-autobiographical basis of the show, which presents comic versions of his coming-out experience and his mother's mental illness. Gadsby was also a co-writer on the series. In a 2016 article about the show, Thomas noted that Gadsby ‘writes her character and all her dialogue and jokes’, adding that her lived experience of mental illness informs her writing about it for the show.Footnote ¹⁶ In writing from their own experience for characters who share their names, Thomas and Gadsby participate in a practice well established by stand-up comedians who have made the jump to television comedy, including Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres and Roseanne Barr, to name a few.

In Episode 2 of Season 2 of Please Like Me, Josh brings a box of chocolates to the hospital and shares them with his mother's fellow patients, Ginger (Denise Drysdale) and Hannah. With one chocolate left, Rose proposes they play a game inspired by the film Notting Hill (1999): whoever has the worst loss-of-virginity story gets the last chocolate. Josh's mum reveals Josh's first time, when he thought he was inside his partner though he actually wasn't. Josh says he's not sure if that counts, and instead relates a second story of a time when he ‘thought he was doing a good job’, but in fact his partner was having an asthma attack because his room was so dusty.Footnote ¹⁷ Rose's and Ginger's stories are reasonably unremarkable. When it comes to Hannah's turn, she says, ‘I was raped’. The other characters pause. Rose says, ‘That's very forward’, and Josh apologizes, for his mum and for the game. Hannah responds, ‘No, I don't mind; I just knew the whole time you were talking that I was going to get the chocolate’. Realizing Hannah's victory, Ginger, who has already told her story, makes another play for the chocolate: ‘I was raped too’. In announcing she was raped, Hannah seems to stop the game, because rape is not funny. But the tone of voice in which she announces she was raped is ambiguously comic: she delivers the line in a low-affect voice that also uses uptalk, the characteristically Australian vocal tic of making statements as though they are questions.Footnote ¹⁸ One of the questions raised by Hannah's voice is the insensitivity of playing this game in a room full of people suffering from many kinds of trauma, an issue Josh raised explicitly when his mother first suggested the game. Hannah's tone might also return us to Josh's question about whether the time he thought he was inside his partner when he wasn't ‘counts’ as losing his virginity under the terms of the game. Hannah's rape indisputably counts, and yet the question in her voice registers that she is not talking about the same thing as the other players. The ‘worst loss of virginity’ game assumes that the worst stories will still be funny, and Hannah's traumatic story shows the problem with that assumption and ends the game.

But it also wins the game, and Hannah makes clear that in revealing her rape she was being strategic as well as truthful: she wanted the chocolate. In some ways, Hannah's statement that she was raped inverts the position and function of a punchline. In Nanette Gadsby describes a joke as ‘a question with a surprise answer’, the punchline being the surprise answer. Simon Critchley notes that jokes require

In Please Like Me Hannah technically follows the rules of the game while showing to be false the players’ assumption (a type of consensus) that a bad loss-of-virginity story is funny. Her surprise answer creates more tension rather than popping the bubble. The game stops being funny. And yet Hannah's explanation that she knew all along that she would win the chocolate returns us to a comic register. Ginger's interjection that she was raped too doubles down on the return to the comic by attempting to interpolate rape into the rules of the game. That this is funny depends on our knowledge that Ginger is lying, and that the game's players, bar Josh, are psychiatric patients. It depends, that is, on character, context and dialogue.

Inserting tension in place of a punchline is one of Gadsby's key strategies in Nanette, a comedy show that does not ultimately return us to the comic register. In one part of the show, Gadsby explains how jokes work in terms very similar to Critchley's: a joke builds tension, which the punchline then releases when everyone laughs. But, Gadsby emphasizes, as a comedian she is the one creating the tension and then getting credit (in the form of the audience's laughter or applause) for releasing it. ‘This is an abusive relationship’, she tells the audience. Gadsby links her expertise at dispelling tension, or being funny, to her childhood, when her gender-non-normativity was a source of tension in her household and community. ‘I didn't have to invent the tension; I was the tension’, she says. Gadsby's self-description resonates with Ahmed's understanding of the tensions feminists seem to cause by being unhappy. For example, when a woman of colour walks into a room full of white feminists, Ahmed writes, ‘the tension is located somewhere: in being felt by some bodies, it is attributed as caused by another body, who thus comes to be felt as apart from the group, as getting in the way of its organic enjoyment and solidarity’.Footnote ²⁰ In dispelling tension through self-deprecating humour in her performed comedy, Gadsby explains in the show, she reinforced her own internalized marginalization and homophobia.

As an example of how this worked for her, Gadsby performs an old standby from her comedy career, the story of a time when she was nearly beaten up for chatting up a woman at a bus stop in Tasmania. The woman's boyfriend turned up and started shoving Gadsby, saying, ‘Fuck off, you fucking faggot. Keep away from my girlfriend, you fucking freak!’ The woman intervened, saying, ‘Whoa, stop it, it's a girl!’ The man apologized and backed off, saying, ‘I don't hit women. Sorry, I got confused, I thought you were a fucking faggot, trying to crack onto my girlfriend’. The punchline to this story is when Gadsby tells the audience, ‘Now I do understand that I have a responsibility to help lead people out of ignorance at every opportunity I can, but I left him there, people. Safety first’. The audience laughs and applauds. But later in the show, Gadsby reveals that she hasn't been telling the whole story. The man at the bus stop realized his mistake, came back, and said, ‘I get it, you're a lady faggot; I'm allowed to beat the shit out of youse’, and he did. ‘And nobody stopped him!’ Gadsby says angrily. She adds that she did not report the crime or take herself to hospital because she thought that was all she was worth. She then points out the gendered nature of the violence, which would not have happened if she had been feminine, adding, ‘And this tension, it's yours; I am not helping you anymore’. What Nanette does, or purports to do, is put the tension in the room and not diffuse it. Thus the show starts out in a comic register, but much of it is not intended to provoke laughter or amusement. It explicitly targets straight white men, potentially dividing the audience. ‘Split the room’, Gadsby comments after one such moment. When Gadsby refuses to help the audience, she refuses comedy's primary purpose, making them laugh. When she splits the room, if she splits it, she denies at least some of the audience its enjoyment and solidarity. In Ahmed's terms, Gadsby becomes a killjoy comedian.

Does Gadsby split the room? Although the show was highly successful, it inspired mixed responses, and not only among men.Footnote ²¹ These mixed responses were at least partly intentional, insofar as Gadsby rhetorically divides her audience when she targets straight white men. But during a July 2018 interview about Nanette with American late-night talk-show host Jimmy Fallon, Gadsby framed her attempt to split the room as a failure: ‘I really thought it would divide audiences, and it just hasn't’.Footnote ²² It is certainly not true that everyone who saw Nanette loved it unequivocally, or that its audiences formed a monolithic unit: I, for one, felt ambivalent about the show's embeddedness in the rhetoric of trauma and identity even as I found it emotionally powerful and fascinating in its manipulation of audience response. But Gadsby's comment that it failed to divide audiences also resonates with my experience of sitting in crowds that seemed overwhelmingly to want to support her, judging by the outbursts of applause and laughter. This suggests how the group dynamics of live spectatorship can make it difficult to split the room in a discernible way even when some spectators are ambivalent or uncomfortable. Indeed, Ian Royall's positive 6 April 2017 review in the Melbourne newspaper Herald Sun described the show in terms that suggested that Gadsby was unifying the audience for political ends: ‘Sure, at times it did sometimes feel a bit like a rally – but it was a rage against the awfulness of the world’.Footnote ²³ When I saw the show in Melbourne, the sense of a rally crept in at moments when the audience applauded Gadsby's politics, particularly when she raised her voice to express anger. But at these shows, Gadsby cut off such applause more than once. In one instance, she explicitly told the audience that this was ‘not a political rally’, perhaps in response to Royall's review. Another time, an audience member began to applaud during a pause in one of Gadsby's angry speeches, seemingly in solidarity with her politics. ‘Don't you clap’, Gadsby said, ‘don't you break that tension’. But another time when she told the audience to stop applauding, Gadsby suddenly dropped into the dry, humorous mode of the early part of the show to hedge, ‘well, a bit at the end would be nice’, diffusing the tension she had created. These moments early in Nanette’s run show Gadsby working out how best to manipulate conventions of audience response – laughter and applause – that imply consensus, even if and when the reasons for these responses are diverse.

In the Netflix version, although the show continues in an angry register, Gadsby tells one more joke – not her best, I think intentionally – when she tells the straight white men in the room to ‘pull your socks up’ and adds, ‘fashion advice from a lesbian, how humiliating’. The audience laughs and applauds more than the joke warrants, temporarily releasing tension. ‘That's your last joke’, Gadsby warns. Perhaps Gadsby developed her unfashionable lesbian joke later in the run – I do not remember it being in the Melbourne shows – as a steam valve to control when the tension does and does not break. As she says in the show, she is very good at her job. Just after her joke, Gadsby ramps the tension up again, explaining that she was sexually abused by a man as a child, beaten by the bus stop man when she was seventeen, and raped by two men when she was in her early twenties. She has to quit comedy, she says,

What Gadsby wants, she explains, is an audience that is not united by either laughter or anger; instead, she hopes for ‘individuals with minds of their own’ who will help her take care of her story, now told more fully than it could be in traditional stand-up.

But when I consider comedy's possibilities as well as its limitations, I find myself returning to the scene from Please Like Me. Because Hannah's revelation that she was raped is not only an inversion of a punchline; it is a punchline reimagined, in the sense that it is the surprise answer to a question that makes us see the question differently. It makes the revelation of rape a structural punchline, but this only works because the show assumes a consensus on the part of its audience that rape is not funny. The show agrees with that consensus, but the scene is still comic. The comedy comes, for one thing, from the gap between the seriousness of rape and the inconsequential chocolate for which Hannah reveals it. She kills a fly with a sledgehammer. The humour is tonally deflationary, but it also asserts Hannah's ownership of her own story, which she can deploy for chocolate if she so chooses. Of course, we might also understand Hannah as failing to cope with her trauma by minimizing it. And yet she knows she will win the game because she knows she has the most traumatic story.

In Nanette Gadsby says, ‘Punchlines need trauma, because punchlines need tension, and tension feeds trauma’. She says she has sealed her trauma off into jokes, and she has to stop telling the jokes in order to stop sealing off the trauma. ‘Tension isolates us’, she says, ‘and laughter connects us’. But there are tensions that connect. In the spirit of Gadsby's own discussion in Nanette of the semiotic range of the colour blue – which encompasses the sadness of ‘feeling blue’ as well as the optimism of ‘blue skies’ – we might note that to hold two or more things in tension posits a connection between them without collapsing them into each other. A tensile rope links hands that hold it. Without tension there would be fewer kinds of bridges. Sexual tension (not just its release) is sometimes pleasurable. If we see Hannah's statement in Please Like Me as a punchline, a surprising answer that shows what was wrong with the question, then there is much more hope for comedy than Gadsby's renunciation in Nanette suggests. The answer that shuts down the game both follows the rules and shows the wrong assumptions that led the players to assent to them. If the closing off is also an opening up, comedy can do more than build and release tension; or rather, it can build and release tension in ways that tell fuller stories. This is not to dismiss Gadsby's stated relation to jokes and self-deprecation, but to show that she already knew how to deploy this relation in ways that do more than abject her.

Where Nanette positions the feminist killjoy's humourlessness as an intervention into comedy as a genre, the scene from Please Like Me deploys trauma as a punchline, emphasizing the unfunniness of rape to produce a comic scene. Both shows stage encounters with the idea that rape is not funny, but where Nanette sees this as indicative of comedy's limitations, the Please Like Me scene reveals its affordances. Importantly, these shows fall into different genres and the character, context and dialogue conventional to comedy drama are not present in stand-up. The latter is also subject to industry conditions in which rape jokes are often accepted, and in which Louis C.K. received a standing ovation upon his return to comedy ten months after admitting that multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against him were true.Footnote ²⁴ It is implicitly stand-up and not all genres of comedy that Nanette frames as abjecting. The Please Like Me scene nonetheless raises the possibility that Gadsby's intervention into stand-up and the joke form need not rest, in her career after Nanette, on her hope of creating individual, thinking audience members. She might instead pursue the question of how to tell jokes that enable better kinds of tacit consensus.

‘I didn't mean it’: after Nanette

In 2019 Gadsby embarked on a new world tour with her show Douglas, named after her dog. It too has been picked up for Netflix release, in 2020. Did she ever really intend to quit comedy? During her 2018 interview with Jimmy Fallon, Gadsby said she had expected Nanette to fail, but the plan ‘backfired’. Nanette not only succeeded, but also refused, for a time, to die, with a series of extensions and ‘final’ shows in cities including Sydney, Melbourne, London, New York, Los Angeles and Montreal.Footnote ²⁵ In the face of the Netflix special's success and her growing international celebrity, Gadsby explained to Fallon, she had shelved the idea of quitting: ‘If I quit, I'm an idiot now. If the show had gone as badly as I'd planned, it would have worked. But now, I'm left with a choice: I'll either be an idiot or a hypocrite … I'll be a hypocrite’.Footnote ²⁶ I am uninterested in taking Gadsby to task for her intentions, insofar as I can ascertain them. But in her interview comments we also see that a characteristically Australian mode of self-deprecation, which plays down ambition and attributes success to luck, remains part of her public persona.Footnote ²⁷ When she told Fallon that her plan to fail backfired, she framed her success as itself a failure and accident. Did she really ‘plan’ for the show to go badly? I think not: in her 2017 interview with Leigh Sales, when asked how she was balancing Nanette’s serious content (such as its discussion, cut from the Netflix version, of Australia's plebiscite on same-sex marriage) with the demands of a comedy show, Gadsby replied, ‘I'm destroying my career onstage’, and laughed. She went on to discuss the need to tell her own story in full in Nanette. Sales responded, ‘It sounds like even if it hadn't been well received, you still would have found it personally a useful exercise’. ‘No’, Gadsby replied definitively, ‘If I'd have told this story truthfully … and it had been rejected in the room, no, I would have stopped, I would have adjusted, because that's what I do. That's what being a comedian is: you read the room’.Footnote ²⁸Nanette was always a show constructed for an audience, and quitting was always a conceit in that show. At a live-streamed October 2018 talk with Transparent (2014–19) creator Jill Soloway, Gadsby called the idea of quitting comedy a ‘theatrical device’. ‘I quit comedy the same way Louis C.K. said “sorry”’, she added: ‘I didn't mean it’.Footnote ²⁹

As well as mocking the genre of the celebrity apology, Gadsby's comment points to the ways a comedian's persona extends beyond the stage, since the theatrical device of quitting was one she reaffirmed in interviews about Nanette. To publicly quit, as Ahmed explains in her account of her own 2016 resignation from her post at Goldsmiths, University of London in protest against the administration's failure to address the problem of sexual harassment at the university, is a mode of ‘speaking out’ that says, ‘this is serious enough that I have had enough’.Footnote ³⁰ As a theatrical device, Gadsby's quitting depended on the idea that in her anger she had shed her comic persona. ‘I broke the contract and that's what made this work’, she said in an interview in The Guardian. ‘I betrayed people's trust, and I did that really seriously, not just for effect’.Footnote ³¹ One contract Gadsby broke was the audience's expectation of laughing at jokes. In this respect we might describe Gadsby's performance in Nanette as ‘unjoking’ – an analogue, from the perspective of the performer, to Michael Billig's concept of ‘unlaughter’, ‘a display of not laughing when laughter might otherwise be expected, hoped for or demanded’.Footnote ³² But since Gadsby did not really quit, and since quitting was part of the performance – another way in which she might be said to have betrayed people's trust – a question that emerges in Nanette’s wake is how her persona will change and what sort of performance contract with the audience it will enact.

Constructing performer identity for and with an audience is foundational to stand-up comedy.Footnote ³³ As Andrea Greenbaum has influentially argued, stand-up is rhetorical and persuasive, ‘and stand-up comics can only be successful in their craft when they can convince an audience to look at the world through their comic vision’.Footnote ³⁴ That Nanette strives to persuade is not difficult to see, but can we describe Gadsby's unjoking show as expressing a comic vision? Gadsby weighed in on the debate over whether Nanette is stand-up comedy in the negative on Twitter: ‘I'LL SETTLE THIS: my show is NOT stand up comedy because i got jack of an art form designed by men for men. Female artists often defy genre’, she tweeted in 2017.Footnote ³⁵ Berlant, on the other hand, commented in an interview, ‘despite Hannah Gadsby's claims to the contrary, Nanette remains a comedy, because it is a test of what kinds of observation, surprise, storytelling, lack of fit, insider knowledge, and solidarity the audience will go with on behalf of the jester's higher truth’.Footnote ³⁶ Berlant's understanding of comedy as a test of what the audience will go with resonates with Gadsby's assertion that to be a comedian is to read the room. By this logic Nanette tests the limits of the genre, enacting a shift in Gadsby's persona as well as her comic but unjoking vision. In their rhetorical, persuasive capacities, comic personae not only respond to but also constitute audiences. Building on B. L. Ware and Wil A. Linkugel's claim that a rhetorical persona is ‘a reflection of expectations of the rhetor in the eyes of the audience’, Christopher A. Medjesky argues that, over time, a comedian's persona ‘builds to become the overarching vision of how the comic desires to be viewed and, thus, how the comic views her or his audience’.Footnote ³⁷ Understood in this way, Gadsby's exploded persona in Nanette carries the potential to reconstitute her audience. Its capacity to do so is facilitated by her timing, tone and wordplay even as it is limited by her rhetoric.