All about Douglas, the new Hannah Gadsby show

Long ago in 2017, Netflix was releasing a comedy special called Nanette. Although known in the world of comedy, its writer and performer Hannah Gadsby was not very famous internationally. After Nanette, however, we all talked about her. It was a comedy monologue that would transform the stand up in its form. Hannah Gadsby had decided to announce her retirement from comedy in this monologue that begins with laughter and ends with crying . In Nanette she told her full story and explained how doing comedy with herself was already unbearable. She was open and honest with the abuses that she has had to suffer during her life for being a lesbian woman while, at the same time, doing with the monologue form what she says in the content that she is going to do: redefine the way of telling her story, reflect on comedy.

Now, after almost three years, Douglas arrives, the routine with which she returns to the stage.

Also read: Review of Netflix's Dead to me

What will she talk about in Douglas?

This past Monday, then, Hannah Gadsby's new monologue premiered on Netflix and is now available on the streaming platform along with her previous routine, Nanette. In this monologue, Hannah Gadsby preserves much of what made her popular in Nanette: taunts against the patriarchy, jokes mocking how confusing it is to be a man today, visits to paintings throughout art history to unmask the dynamics of power that we naturalize in art, etc. In addition to all this, we will also see some post-Nanette reflections, that is, the comedian will talk about her new popularity, her arrival in the United States, and her experience as a new celebrity.

She will speak, as she also did in Nanette, about trauma, but this time from a look at her own narration: what to do when you have already told everything? She asks us for intelligence to understand her humor, she demands smarts from her audience and with this she raises the level of the joke. The special is called Douglas, as the first dog she had in her adulthood. This will be a pretext to tell us about a meeting in a park, which will be the narration that surrounds the whole routine.

As she had already done in Nanette, in addition, Hannah Gadsby will reflect on the genre and realize that in the end it does not matter, since its format does not fall into the traditional performance categories: is it a monologue? A stand up routine? A TED talk? In any case, it is a staging in which we will see not only representativeness on stage but intelligent humor and critical comedy that will make us not only laugh but also think about our own and others' behavior. It is undoubtedly a fair and necessary staging that women appreciate being on a massive platform like Netflix, available to many.