It was always going to be difficult for Hannah Gadsby to follow on from her genre defying stand-up show, Nanette – especially when you promise to quit comedy as one of the central premises of said show.
But this wasn’t a challenge to Gadsby, who addressed this all head right from the word go with in a wonderful, meta, précis of her new show Douglas, laying it all out for the audience in the first ten minutes.
The show is named for either her dog, or the anatomical region of the female body, the Pouch of Douglas (Google it!).
It’s during her story connecting these two wonderfully disparate themes that you realise that even though Douglas is a much more conventional stand up show, complete with cracking puns, her feminist politics are still very much on display.
She delivers well aimed barbs about the emotional labour required in dealing with uninvited male comments, and also the male dominated medical establishment, but interlaces it all with some wonderful biscuit based wordplay, keeping the laughs coming at speed.
It feels very much as though Brighton is proving an easy crowd for her, with her from the beginning, and one senses providing far fewer heckles than she is clearly very prepared for.
She doesn’t let us off lightly though, and deftly points out the privilege of her mainly white, rich female audience.
However, it’s during a section on the anti vax movement that we got closest to the raw emotion and anger of Nanette. The atmosphere in the audience shifts palpably, and serves as a reminder that even among an audience as seemingly homogeneous as Gadsby cheerfully admits, significant disagreement exists.
The highest rate of out and out jokes probably come during a wonderful whistlestop PowerPoint presentation of the high renaissance.
She finishes with a marvellous visual joke that is a microcosm of the whole show; a brilliantly funny gag, whilst punching up at a patriarchal society that really still has a long way to go.
