I recently rewatched Hannah Gadsby‘s two Netflix specials, Nanette and Douglas.
I recently rewatched Hannah Gadsby‘s two Netflix specials, Nanette and Douglas. I’ve linked here to the trailers for each of these specials but the trailers don’t hint at the brilliance of Gadsby’s work. If you haven’t seen them, these specials are worth your time. Full disclosure: I think Hannah Gadsby is a comic genius. Brilliant!
Nanette is ground-breaking. Some have called it “post-comedy.” Daniel Feinberg of The Hollywood Reporter calls it “a detailed summation of joke construction that could be a textbook on its own.” Gadsby talks about why laughter is good. Laughter releases tension and holding tension in the human body is not a good thing. A joke is just two things, needs two things to work: a setup and a punch-line. “It is essentially a question with a surprise answer,” she says. As a comic, her job is to “artificially inseminate” the question, the setup, with tension. And the suprise answer, the punchline, releases the tension by making the audience laugh. She is so good at it, she says, because that tension relief has been a survival tactic for her whole life. I won’t go on to spoil what she talks about for the rest of the special. It just needs to be experienced. It is profound.
As ground-breaking and profound as Nanette is, I think Douglas is an even better illustration of Gadsby’s mastery of her discipline. She talks about the criticisms she heard about Nanette. Those who didn’t like it said it wasn’t funny, that it was a lecture rather than a comedy show, that Gadsby herself isn’t funny. In Douglas, Gadsby leans into those criticisms to prove that she knows exactly what she’s doing. She starts the show with a synopsis of everything she’s going to do in the show and exactly how the audience is going to react. She even says she’s going to give a lecture in the middle of the show. She then does exactly what she said she was going to do and despite having been given the synopsis, the audience reacts just as she said they would. And her lecture is hilarious. This comedian understands comedy and how to make people laugh, even when she’s subverting the conventions of comedy.
In the Cluster Pedagogy Learning Community (CPLC), we talk a lot about how to engage our students in interdisciplinary work. Our colleague Abby Goode, in her article Slow Interdisciplinarity, writes that interdisciplinarity “entails a metacognitive awareness of one’s own discipline, and an ability to explain that discipline to others.” That is, in order to engage in interdisciplinary work, our students need to be able to explain their disciplines. We need to help our students understand our disciplines so well that they can articulate the tools, methodologies, and ways of engaging with the world utilized by the discipline, much like Gadsby does with comedy.
We have just created a new Game Design major at PSU and so I’ve been thinking about this question for this new (to us) discipline. I don’t have a full answer yet but here are some initial thoughts. Game design ta