'Hannah Gadsby: Woof' review: A comic's pet themes

The Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby at the home of friend and director Jill Soloway in Los Angeles, July 16, 2018. (Molly Matalon/The New York Times) by Houman Barekat

EDINBURGH.— The title of Hannah Gadsby’s new stand-up show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is “Woof,” but the Australian comic has a very specific type of dog bark in mind. It sounds like something between a burp and a cough. It’s impossible to spell, but if you had to, it might go something like “peuh.” Gadsby says it typically signals that the animal is about to go into a frenzy. As a metaphor for Gadsby’s state of mind, it’s inauspicious. Should we be concerned?

Well, yes and no. For the most part, Gadsby’s new routine, at the Underbelly through Sunday, is a chill affair. Gadsby is on genial form, taking acerbic pot shots at Taylor Swift (“a can of Coke masquerading as a sorority cult”) and social media (“where neurotypical people go to experience the worst of autism”). There’s some pleasingly risque material about the sex lives of lesbian soccer players that is too graphic to discuss here.

But when the focus turns inward, the vibe shifts. Gadsby describes a sense of discombobulation and a kind of existential vertigo that comes with having achieved fame and fortune relatively late in life.

“My bed is so comfortable,” Gadsby says, “and that keeps me up at night.”

This is, of course, nothing new — there is always a lot of Hannah Gadsby in a Hannah Gadsby show. “Nanette,” the 2018 Netflix special that catapulted Gadsby from relative obscurity to stardom, drew heavily on harrowing personal experiences of gendered violence. “Douglas” (2020) explored Gadsby’s autism diagnosis. An online run-in with Netflix bosses, over a routine by Dave Chapelle that critics described as transphobic, cemented Gadsby’s status as a culture war lodestar, and inspired the 2024 comedy showcase, “Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda.”

The story of that career trajectory is inextricable from the oeuvre itself, making Gadsby something like the Rachel Cusk of comedy. This inevitably brings a certain anxiety about shelf-life, and the specter of demise haunts this set. Gadsby, who uses they/them pronouns, notes that this is their first Fringe appearance in seven years, and playfully suggests that returning to the festival — known for showcasing up-and-comers — is a fall from grace. Later, Gadsby imagines angry Swifties ending their career. “There’s nothing more feminist,” they quip, “than getting canceled by other feminists.”

Gadsby also fears they might be too low-key, or too idiosyncratic, to command sustained attention. “I’m not the right person for this success,” they say — but most famous people have felt this way at some point. Besides, that whimsical nature is precisely what people like, and in our increasingly fragmented mass culture it doesn’t really matter if your material doesn’t work for everyone. There are many publics.

More interesting are Gadsby’s thoughts on the mental health implications of baring your soul to earn a living. Fame, as Morrissey once sang, can play hideous tricks on the brain; living your emotional life so publicly — as Gadsby has been doing for a while now — is fraught with risk. Our entertainment and publishing industries are happy to make a quick buck off personal pain and trauma, but offer little in the way of safeguarding or aftercare. Gadsby recently lost a parent and had intended to do a whole show about grief, before realizing it was too soon. That degree of emotional self-awareness, and control, bodes well: Knowing when to step back is key.

Gadsby talks a lot in this routine about the Cabbage Patch Kids, those revolting plastic dolls that were a 1980s must-have for children, but are now presumably littering landfills, and adds that the success of the recent “Barbie” movie, with its attendant spike in sales of Barbie dolls, intensified her ecological ennui.

What, then, of this equally faddish contemporary cannon of confessional art — the comedy specials, the podcasts, the autofictions? Will we clog up the rivers and seas of the future with our embarrassment? Books will disintegrate, eventually, and the vast majority of digital content is doomed to fade away as successive technologies phase into obsolescence. For Gadsby, there might be some comfort in that.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.