It’s almost impossible to talk about Hannah Gadsby without talking about Nanette. When that comedy special hit Netflix in 2018 – fuelled by well-earned and well-articulated rage at the comedy industry’s in-built misogyny, amongst other things – it sparked a reckoning, and shot a moderately well-known Australian comedian into the stratosphere of global fame. Indeed, even Hannah Gadsby can’t avoid bringing up Nanette when talking about Hannah Gadsby.
In the shows since, fans have loyally followed along as Gadsby has bared their soul, sharing intimate details, from reckoning with sudden fame and the pressure of success, to proposing to their now-wife, navigating neurodivergence, their evolving relationship with gender (Gadsby has quietly started using they/them pronouns in recent years), moving to the United States, and the general anxieties that come with living in a world that’s backsliding into a state of techno-fascism at a terrifying pace.
With The Evening Muse, Gadsby’s exclusive offering for the 2026 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, they share the latest frontier they’re forced to reckon with: doorways.
Hannah Gadsby review – quick links
Laughing about anxiety
While an apprehension to leaving the house is an affliction that many people have found it hard to shake since the pandemic, Gadsby shares that a new evolution of agoraphobia is leaving them trapped in rooms, the fear of what’s on the other side of a door filling them with paralysing dread and making them more antisocial than ever before. It seems that even quitting social media can’t do much to blunt the existential crisis stirred up by the omnipresent threat that World War Three is about to kick off at any moment.
Promoted as ‘like a tonight show, but it’s hosted by Hannah’, this rather work-in-progress-style show begins with a segment of stand up, before switching up the format to invite guest comedians onto the stage for some banter and competitive trivia, care of a vintage Trivial Pursuit deck.
Fans of Gadsby’s style of dry humour and searing social critique do not exactly expect light entertainment or a typically uplifting show. But, when the performer you’ve come to see makes a point of mentioning that they’re only doing this show to force them to leave the house, while expressing apprehension about being on stage at all, it might prompt audiences to wonder whether they should have bothered to show up either.
Are they doing a schtick, or is this a genuine existential crisis? It’s unclear.
Wavering confidence
On the evening we attended on 2 April, this unease was doubled down by an excruciatingly forced attempt at audience interaction at the top of the show – a moment sandwiched between comments about how much Gadsby ‘hates’ doing audience interaction, but how it has essentially become ‘compulsory’ in our algorithmically-driven world (a potentially pertinent observation that was lost in the execution).
While uneven in tone, Gadsby’s signature wit and honest insights shine when they find their flow in the stand up, with some particularly intriguing musings on how we’ve ended up with the perfect conditions to ‘turn anyone into an extremist’. There’s also pleasure to be found in their interactions with the guests – a roster of lesser-known but highly talented comedians with whom they’ve chosen to share their platform – in the latter half of the show.
It doesn’t feel like it’s been all that long since Gadsby’s most recent comedy special, Woof!, dropped in October 2024. Ditching their previous deal with Netflix (which Gadsby has previously accused of being an ‘amoral algorithm cult’ that ‘makes transphobia profitable’) and opting to release it independently as an audio-only recording (as well as an animated, 20-minute version on YouTube, both of which you can access for free), Woof! marked an exciting change of pace. Meanwhile, the Late Night Muse experiment comes off somewhat less confident.
More of a storyteller than your typical joke-a-minute comedian, Gadsby’s best work blurs the line between entertainer, artist and truthsayer. These are the makings of a great opening monologue (a task often outsourced to an entire team) – but is a famously introverted comedian able to carry the overwhelmingly extroverted demands of a late night host? Or, is a case of fluctuating agoraphobia stunting what’s truly possible?
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Chasing joy
Early on in the show, Gadsby shares that they started out the year with a mission to pursue joy – something that they’ve always found it difficult to obtain, and which has not been helped by the cataclysmic state of the world. While this may seem silly, the necessity of claiming joy only becomes more important as the world grows darker (and leaving the house more daunting).
However, we never get a clear answer on how close they’ve come to seizing that joy. Gadsby’s honesty is one of their greatest strengths, and perhaps they don’t wish to pull the wool over our eyes with any false promises of enlightenment here. It’s the same quality that prevented them from letting the success of Nanette boost their ego enough to start a cult. (And Gadsby will tell you themself, they were only ‘a self-help book and a smoothie deal away’ from starting one.)
The Evening Muse is a little rough around the edges – you get the sense that literal doorways aren’t the only frontier Gadsby is wrestling with – but there’s promise that this beloved comedian will rediscover their footing (and their aptitude for leaving the house) through the teething process.
We don’t need Hannah Gadsby to give us another Nanette, and this show is definitely not trying to give us that. But it would be nice to be able to leave with some sense of cathartic relief.
