The first half-hour or so of Hannah Gadsby’s new show, Woof!, could be mistaken for a shift in Gadsby’s comedic work. The jokes are a little meandering, a little topical, with serviceable but unsurprising material on abortion policy in the United States, Gadsby’s takeaways from the Barbie movie (less about feminism than about plastic), and some left-field musing about whales. It’s heavily referential with a stretch about Taylor Swift and little callouts to everything from Twin Peaks to British filmmaker Ken Loach. There’s material about social media (“where neurotypical people go to experience the worst of autism”). It’s got the familiar famous-comedian move of ensuring relatability by doing lots of jokes about sex, including one long explanation of exactly what a Fleshlight is and then a metaphor about the obvious parallels between Fleshlights and Silicon Valley.
There’s plenty of the notable Gadsbian flare for jokes that circle back on themselves and call forward to later parts of the show, but without the edge of a lit fuse slowly burning that characterizes the opening of Nanette or the Tristram Shandy–esque metastructure of Douglas. (Gadsby’s third special, 2023’s Something Special, is like many major comedians’ post-pandemic specials: more of an attempt to get back on the horse than a swing at their best, most artful work.) But as Woof! spins on, the shape of its obsessions and the things that make it unmistakably a Hannah Gadsby show become clearer and more prominent. It has a messier, looser structure than they’ve developed in the past; it’s less of a sprung trap and more of a diaristic stroll through the ideas their brain is caught on at the moment. But it still coalesces around a set of ideas, metamorphosing into a show about attempting to grapple with change, identification, Gadsby’s father’s death, and their fear of losing themself. It’s unlikely to set the world on fire in the way Nanette did, but it’s also more ambitious and striking than Gadsby’s work has been since then. Its looseness is an asset.
Amid its catch-up-on-the-news opening section, Woof! offers a framing device for the ideas that come later. “This is a show about the big questions,” Gadsby says, though the first examples of what those big questions might be are mostly jokes. (What do whales think about humans listening to their conversations as relaxing bedtime noise? Where did all the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls go?) About 30 minutes into the performance, Gadsby explains that this is not the show they’d originally planned. Early in the tour, they’d been working on a more traditional “My dad died” show, they say, but in the years since Nanette, they’ve been pegged as a trauma comedian. “I’ve felt an enormous amount of pressure to further mine my trauma in my work,” they say. Nanette’s success gave them a brand — a specific visual and thematic identity that their audience has come to expect. So the obvious move, they felt, was to do “a trauma show.” “And to be fair,” they say, “I’ve got a whole herd of Baby Reindeer I could slay.” But at the last minute, they say, they decided against doing the dead-dad show. They are not traumatized by their father’s death. They do not want to be pegged as a trauma comedian.
Nevertheless, the show that Woof! develops into does sometimes resemble the thing Gadsby says they’re trying to avoid. Like that model of one-person show, Woof! has revelations buried inside it that wait until the performance is well underway before popping up on the radar, acting like icebergs of theme and preoccupation that lurk under the surface until suddenly they’re right in front of you. But it’s not a show where Gadsby’s dead father becomes the central organizing premise. Instead, it’s part of a more kaleidoscopic projection of where Gadsby finds themself at this point in life — thinking about who they are, how they’ve changed since becoming famous, what parts of their identity they want to retain, and what they worry they’re losing. Woof! is not attempting to be about the kind of big, vague, overly general questions that end up as memetic Instagram fodder. It’s about Gadsby’s own specific big questions. Their father died. Are they traumatized by it? Should they center that experience in their art because that’s what the world expects of them?
Douglas, Gadsby’s first special after Nanette, has its own motivating ideas and revelations, but in the comedian’s frantic effort to not be pigeonholed by what Nanette accomplished, Gadsby’s work in that special comes off frenetic and overcontrolled, full of so many baroque structural devices, layers of self-reference, and callbacks that its closing turn toward slideshow-art criticism feels ebulliently unhinged by comparison. Its high-key chipperness can be off-putting, and in an effort to look like it’s avoiding the past, that hour can feel like it’s crawling even farther up its own ass. But even then, Gadsby was smuggling a nervous honesty inside that special; the rhetorical flourishes that look smug are clearly defensive maneuvers. In Woof!, Gadsby explicitly recalls Nanette and ignores Douglas, but it’s just as much in the mix. Nanette is about Gadsby trying to explain their comedic outlook to an audience. Douglas and Woof! (both titles that reference Gadsby’s dog, though Woof! doesn’t explain its dogginess at all) are more about Gadsby attempting to explain how their brain works for themself. Woof!, Gadsby says, is like a true-crime podcast, “a sequence of feelings I need to solve.”
One of those sequences is about their father, and especially a memory Gadsby has invented for themself of the hours before his death. But wrapped up in that — and inextricable from how Gadsby has been trying to grapple with the current moment — is their awareness that they have changed over the past decade. They’ve gotten more comfortable with fame, and they can feel themselves becoming both more confident and more distant from the reality of most people’s lives. They used to work as a motel cleaner, a tangent that inspires one of the performance’s most memorable and ridiculous images of a fecal mess Gadsby once had to clean up. Now, they say, “I have two mattress toppers! And that keeps me up at night! I’m a princess with an existential pea. My bed is too comfortable. What is wrong with me?!” They’re worried that they’re going to lose all the things that have made them the comedian (and the person) that they are; at the same time, they’re trapped by an audience expectation that they should not change too much. They should stay the person who made Nanette, who speaks about trauma, who thought of themselves as a butch lesbian, who wears glasses and talks about art and identifies as tired.
Gadsby is painfully aware that a lot of this is already beyond the bounds of easy relatability. “I just want you to know that I’m struggling,” they say, ironic and sincere at once. But as they work through those ideas over the course of Woof!, they’re aided by their decision not to try to make this into Douglas or Nanette. There will be no pat, easy takeaways. There are a few fun surprises but no astonishing twists that build to one grand conclusion. The show is called Woof!, and yet its most pervasive animal imagery is about whales, and audiences will just have to live with it. Gadsby’s commitment to denying closure is so complete that when the show ends, they remain onstage while the lights brighten and the audience starts filing out, waving and nodding thanks and gesturing that people should leave, but never offering the comfortable resolution of finally declaring that the show is over.
There are some downsides to the messiness. At moments Gadsby sounds like the Simpsons meme of the old man shaking his fist at the cloud and wondering what’s gone wrong with the world these days, and even though Gadsby’s also mocking themselves for being out of touch, parts of the show feel less surprising than they could. More notably, in its current stage form, Woof! runs about 90 minutes, and even for a looser show, there are places where it could get tighter. Some of the material duplicates the idea of a previous joke (a joke about glasses and a joke about sleep apnea, for instance, end up being repetitive articulations of the same thing). Gadsby opens with a joke designed to dismiss any expectation of crowdwork but then uses crowdwork throughout the show anyway. But in all, Woof! is stronger than the previous two specials because Gadsby lets it breathe, and its inconclusive messiness is its own evolution from the brand of tightly wound puzzle-box wordplay Gadsby’s become known for. There may be a time, Gadsby says, that they “lose the struggle” and become a “bad apple.” “You’ll be able to separate later me from my earlier art. Draw a line, call me a cunt. You can do it.” There may be a time, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Woof! is at the Abrons Arts Center through October 27.
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