Hannah Gadsby Quotes

As a coping mechanism for teenage me, masking was an incredibly successful tactic – I was only bullied intermittently during my school years – but as a catalyst for growth, it worked more like castration.

everyone around the world has a humor

Ever since I can remember, my thoughts have been plagued by a sense that I was a little out of whack, as if belonging was beyond me.

I built my career on writing jokes apologizing for myself. It’s what most people do. You have to explain who you are, and you point to a difference that you have. That’s your angle. But when it becomes the only reason you speak, it becomes an issue; all your material revolves around why you’re different. The great freedom post-“Nanette” was that I’d put all that on the table.

Autism is not a prison. It’s not something that should be terrifying. It is not a disability except that the world makes it incredibly difficult for us to function — and no one is asking what people with autism think.

I think a helpful way for everybody to think about it is that I’m not on the spectrum: Everybody is on a spectrum. The human brain is on a spectrum, just as gender is.

A Netflix deal is fantastic, but it hasn’t changed my life, because I keep my life small.

I do think conversations are at a point where we’re not listening to people with lived experience anymore. We’re listening to people who have really hostile reactive views, and that it’s caught up in a moral panic, which also has a very, very strong right-wing online presence that is stirring up the debate, and it’s fairly unacknowledged. I want to come from a more constructive point of view, like I am genderqueer. I have a life, and it doesn’t revolve around trying to justify my existence.

if you want to change the conversation, you really do have to step into the murky waters, don’t you?

(You spend time in the new special responding to your online trolls. Why not just ignore them? Isn’t devoting time to them a way of giving them power?) These people are actually humans. They live and they say things and they mean it, and I can’t believe that in all aspects of their life they’re that crazy. I don’t want to live in a vacuum where I’m like, There are those people with dumb ideas. I want them to know their ideas are dumb but they’re not dumb.

I don’t want to circle the drain of trauma. I don’t want to be a one note comic. I want to have freedom of expression, and in order to do that, I need to train my audiences to not expect stuff from me.

I wish more than anything that I had known about my ASD when I was a kid, just so I could have learned how to look after my own distress, instead of assuming my pain was normal and deserved. There is no one to blame, but I still grieve for the quality of life I lost because I didn’t have this key piece to my human puzzle.

I couldn’t have written ‘‘Nanette’’ without understanding that I had autism. I don’t read the world the way other people read it.

I think there’s something also quite political about a genderqueer performer expressing joy on stage.

People think that if you get up onstage, a joke is funny or it’s not. No. The audience is participating in this conversation. The audience brings their own baggage. So I would never say you cannot do rape jokes. I’m just saying can we please acknowledge that women get raped? Men also. People get raped, and it’s traumatizing, and we do not have a language or a narrative in which to place that wider trauma. So just having throw-away punch lines, sure, you can do it, but people get triggered, and the reason people get triggered is because other people don’t care. They’re like, “We think it’s funny; get over yourself.” That’s because there’s no broader cultural context for the viewpoint of people who’ve been traumatized. I don’t believe in censorship, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to say, “Hey, be better.”