It’s been seven years since Hannah Gadsby was last at the Edinburgh Fringe, debuting ‘Nanette’ before it exploded on Netflix, cementing the stand-up as a Fringe-changed-your-life household legend. A lot has changed since then: they’ve won an Emmy, published a New York Times best-selling memoir and ‘started sleeping in posh hotels’. Gadsby, in other words, is now living a different life. It’s one of the themes they explore with exhausting self-awareness in ‘Woof!’ – along with all of the anxieties about remaining relatable that lurk under that level of fame. As they hammer home: how on earth will we be able to laugh along to a story about swimming with whales?
Spoiler: we aren’t able to. The Aussie stand-up starts the show by telling us it will be about ‘big questions’ and goes on to touch on everything from grief and class to gender, climate anxiety and being neurodiverse. It’s packed with sharp, intelligent writing: it has a clever narrative and is vulnerable and brave. But, as an hour and a bit of comedy, it falls flat. Maybe it’s the over-emphasis on ‘meh’ references to cabbage patch dolls and plastic plants, the cheap poo jokes or the baffling, desperate whale sketches. Perhaps it is trying to do too much at once, or – more likely – the problem is that the show lacks any grittines and actual humour for it to properly resonate. While confident, the delivery is overly casual and the more soul-searching spiels verge on self-indulgent. Clever moments of societal critique, in particular about tech companies, evaporate before they have time to land. It would be better advertised as a work in progress or a live memoir reading. Looking around, where were the belly laughs – where were the smirks? In this instance, I fear that Gadsby’s anxieties about a lasting disconnect may be self-fulfilling.