In very exciting podcast news, stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby is joining Deborah Frances-White and a lineup of hilarious women for a special episode of The Guilty Feminist in July.  Frances-White made the announcement this week, confirming that the event will take place at the Royal Albert Hall at 3pm on 7 July. Aisling Bea, Susan Wokoma, Sindhu Vee and Felicity Ward are just some of the Guilty Feminist favourites who will also perform. You can buy tickets for the show here. 

Gadsby also made another exciting announcing earlier this year, with news that she’s bringing her new tour Douglas to the UK. Which we imagine will prove exciting to anyone who became obsessed with last year’s powerful Netflix show Nanette (that’s pretty much all of us, right?). 

Gadbsy will take the tour to Oxford, London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Brighton across dates in October and November 2019. Find tickets for Douglas here.

Why is everyone talking about Hannah Gadsby?

For those who need a quick reminder: Gadsby quickly changed the tone of the comedy show as she unpacked her traumas on stage, before announcing that she now refuses to use self-deprecation to cope with them by gaining laughs. “Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from someone who is already in the margins?” she asked. “It’s not humility. It’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission to speak.”

Gadbsy clearly has a lot more to say on her experiences of being a queer woman living with autism, which is why we look forward to the new show.

Watch Hannah Gadsby’s TED Talk then read on to see five of our favourite quotes

Gadbsy’s recent TED Talk Three Ideas. Three Contradictions. Kinda delivered some more incredible moments.

Explaining the title of the talk, Gadsby shared her rule of three: make a statement, back that up with a list of examples to create a pattern, and make one of those examples a surprise. “It’s fundamental to the way I do my craft, and it’s fundamental to the way I communicate,” she explained, before continuing to explore her own contradictions.

Check it out for yourself…

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1. “Quitting launched my comedy career”

Explaining one of her life’s biggest contradictions, she said: “After quitting comedy I became the most talked about comedian on the planet. Because, I’m even worse at making retirement plans than I am at speaking my own mind.”

2. “Ah well, it’s all part of the soup – too late to take the onions out now”

Gadbsy recalled how, when she was at university, she used to write funny letters to her late grandmother because she was unable to properly articulate how she actually felt, saying: “I just didn’t think I had the life that grandma would want to read about. Grandma did not know I was gay.” Describing why she didn’t tell her grandma that she was gay before she died, Gadsby added: “I couldn’t help feel I’d made a mistake not to share such a significant part of my life.” She then shared her grandma’s poignant and touching saying about not fishing regrets out of the soup.

3. “Speech has always felt like an inadequate freeze-frame for the life inside of me”

Beautifully articulating how her mind works with autism, Gadbsy said: “My thought process is not linear, I’m a visual thinker – I see thoughts.” She added: “I use an ever-evolving language of hieroglyphics that I’ve developed and I can understand fluently and think deeply with - but I struggle to translate.”

4. “What was the purpose of my human?”

This is the question that Gadbsy asked herself, which led to putting Nanette together. “I realised that I’ve been telling my stories for laughs. I’ve been trimming away the darkness, cutting away the pain and holding on to my trauma for the comfort of my audience. I was connecting other people through laughs but I remained profoundly disconnected,” she said. “What was the purpose of my human? I did not have an answer but I had an idea. I had an idea to tell my truth, all of it. Not to share laughs but to share the literal, visceral pain of my trauma and I thought the best way to do that was with a comedy show.”

5. “I wrote a show that did not respect the punchline”

“That line [is] where comedians are expected and trusted to pull their punches and turn them into tickles. I did not stop, I punched through that line into the metaphorical guts of my audience,” said Gadbsy. “I did not want to make them laugh. I wanted to take their breath away, to shock them – so that they would listen to my story and hold my pain as individuals and not as a laughing mod. That’s what I did, and I called that show Nanette.” 

Image: Getty