Hannah Gadsby is like the tortoise from Aesop’s fable; slow-paced, methodical and self-deprecating.
As she OUTinPerth, ‘I don’t have much of a heart rate, my dad’s slower than me and if he walked any slower he’d be walking backwards. I’m here for the long run’.
Yet she is also like the hare with lightning fast wit that is sharp and on target. A shining example of Gadsby was seen while performing at the 2009 New Zealand Comedy Festival.
‘You know what someone said to me recently,’ she told audiences in 2009, ‘Hannah, you’re only a lesbian because no man would sleep with you.’
A heckler bellowed to the stage ‘why would they?’ to which she quickly quipped back ‘thanks dad’.
For this month’s Wild West Comedy Festival here in Perth, Gadsby brings her well-acclaimed show, Mrs Chuckles. Gadsby grew up in Smithton, a quiet town in north-west Tasmania.
‘I was quiet, a bit dopey. I had my moments but generally I was pretty quiet. I used to fall asleep in cupboards a lot,’ she said.
‘I got by. I had a big family so I just hung out with them a lot. It’s a good town to grow up in and a better town to leave.’
As she said in one of her shows, ‘I don’t think 2000 [people] is too bad for seven families’.
On families, the comedian doesn’t fancy herself the maternal type. In former shows, she has poked at the irony of her situation.
‘It’s like my hormones played a cruel joke on me: let’s make this one into the ultimate baby-carrying vessel and then give her absolutely no desire to make one,’ she said at the Melbourne Comedy Festival Gala 2010.
Gadsby treats the fact she is a lesbian the same way she treats it in her shows; it acts as a facet of herself with no more influence than say her Tasmanian heritage.
‘It gets quite a few references but that’s only because it’s the same as a straight man referencing his wife; it’s not the defining part of my comedy but it’s certainly a feature.’
On the mysteries of lesbianism, she told us gay men weren’t ‘missing out on anything’.
‘What a gift to be a gay boy. You guys have so much more fun; it makes sense what you do, just stick it in.
‘There’s so much discussion we’ve got to have.’
Bad flirting techniques also feature in Gadsby’s new show who admitted having never used a pick-up line.
‘I’d call it more hint-dropping than pick up lines. I’m more of a fly-fisher. You just dangle it…’
So what would Mrs Chuckles like to say to the ladies of Perth?
‘Hello, I’m quite shy’
Hannah Gadsby’s new show Mrs Chuckles opens on Wednesday May 25 at the Hellenic Centre, Perth.
Benn Dorrington
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Article first published May 6, 2011
