Hannah Gadsby doesn’t hold back. She never did.
Not when she was on ‘Nanette’, punctuating hair-raising punchlines with a deadpan smile, not now, five months from then, when most people will have applauded her grit, candour, and swirled on with the news cycle.
“If you have to believe that someone else is bad in order to believe that you are good, you are drawing a very dangerous line,’’ Gadsby quipped at the at The Hollywood Reporter’s ‘2018 Women in Entertainment’ gala. She talked about the “lines” that are self-drawn by “good men” in order to clearly dissociate themselves from the “bad” ones.
Gadsby’s opening remarks take you back to her June standup that gained applause worldwide. In ‘Nanette’, Gadsby, who came out of the closet long back, identifies as...tired. When you are living in the fringes, self-deprecatory humour is “not humility. It is humiliation,’’ she exclaims.
In ‘Nanette’, she also mentions that she is no longer in a mood to make you or me laugh – it is time for her to quit comedy.
But Gadsby’s recent video keeps all hopes alive! She might be tired, but she is not willing to let go. Amen to “good men” and their “hot takes on misogyny”. It is time to call out men who think they’re inherently good somehow, and were led astray by some stroke of ill-luck. No more “garden-variety consent dyslexics’’, please!
If the hair-raising vestiges of her show ‘Nanette’ still haven’t clambered off your consciousness, it is definitely time to watch this video and refresh it all!
Dear men,
there are no boxes labelled ‘BUT...’ when it comes to redemption and SWOT analyses – if you are in the wrong, you are in the wrong. No excuses. Stop apologising for friends who are in the wrong. The Bill Cosbys and Harvey Weinsteins cannot be separated from the ‘good men’ who happen to be your friends who messed up.
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