Is the Penguin Made of Box?
The Hannah Gadsby “Discourse” and Autistic Culture
By Aisling Walsh
The first time I watched Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix special, Douglas, in May 2020, I was struck by the very last mic-drop joke about loud noises scaring Autistic people. I thought, “Weird, I also hate loud noises.” I retreated to my bedroom, Googled autism, read multiple lists of autistic traits, determined they were interesting but irrelevant to my life, and then forgot all about it. The second time I watched Douglas a year later, I was in the middle of completing a “life-history” questionnaire in preparation for a clinical autism diagnosis. I needed to remember what it was about Gadsby’s routine that lit the first spark of recognition, and I found even more jokes to identify with: breaking my teachers with my “inappropriate” questions and info-dumping random facts about the female body to strangers who got on my nerves.
The third time I watched Douglas, six months after my appointment, I was beginning to process my autism diagnosis. I was desperate to understand this new identity, so I returned to the source. Not only did Gadsby’s comedy make me feel less alone, but it was also a mirror to my own experiences, and my own ways of thinking, moving and existing in the world. I still wonder if I had not come across their work, and the triumph of destigmatisation that is Douglas, how much longer it would have taken me to realise I was autistic? There are few autistic people with such public profiles and, until recently, with such mainstream acceptance and acclaim. That was before the Pablo-matic exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum launched to resounding criticism in June 2023, and it became open season on Hannah Gadsby.
The Pablo-matic exhibition was one of many to mark the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, but this one focused specifically on the work of women artists responding in one way or another to Picasso’s work. Gadsby acted as co-curator and the exhibition is sprinkled with quotes from Nanette and commentary from Gadsby in relation to specific artwork. The show was, by all accounts, rather ill-conceived and likely deserves criticism, particularly the lack of coherency in the selection of women artists, all of whom were pulled from the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection. The commentary surrounding the exhibit, however, has overwhelmingly focused on Gadsby’s role in the curation. Sadly, the debate erupting over their credentials and their comedy which has too often strayed into ableist territory.
Twitter exploded with derogatory comments on Gadsby’s voice, dress, stage presence, education, comedy content and claiming that Gadsby is simply “annoying,” with many critiques and think pieces across the media echoing these sentiments. The undisguised glee in the rush of people online declaring that they “said from the beginning that Gadsby wasn’t funny,” or that it was another case of “the emperor’s new clothes” and the world was finally seeing Gadsby for the “hack” they really were, was hard to stomach. Some even tried to blame the disjuncture between Australian and US culture for the fact that Gadsby’s “so-called comedy” was simply not funny. There is, however, a greater cultural divide which has not being given due attention: the gap between autistic and neurotypical culture.
“Autistic culture” refers to commonalities in physical and verbal forms of communication and expression, the nature and intensity of interests, sensory preferences and aversions, ways of viewing and understanding the world, ways of expressing interest, care and empathy, and ways of understanding identity and relationships that are present across the autistic Community. Autistic culture is as rich and diverse as neurotypical culture even if it is not understood nor recognised as such by the majority, neurotypical, culture. Though hard to define, because it is often seen as our “default” expression of culture, neurotypical culture, according to Dr. Devon Price, is based on the assumption that we all “think, socialise, feel express emotion, process sensory information and communicate in more or less the same ways.” It can include everything from the expectations for small talk and sustained eye-contact in everyday interactions, to the way you dress, the focus and intensity of your interests and much more. ‘Neurotypical is to autistic as straight is to gay,’ according to Dr. Nick Walker. This gap in understanding between the two cultures could be attributed to the double empathy bind, meaning the lack of common ground between Autistic and neurotypical people for communicating and understanding each other. Autism is often understood as a communication deficit, but Damian Milton, who first developed the concept of double empathy suggests that autistic people communicate very well with other autistics, the problems tend to occur when we are communicating across the neurodivergent-neurotypical divide and vice-versa.
Most of the commentary surrounding Gadsby and their comedy in the wake of the Pablo-matic exhibition has failed to grasp that autism is not just a personality quirk nor an interesting anecdote, but intrinsic to Gadsby’s approach to comedy. This commentary betrays a deep ignorance of autism, Autistic Culture, and what it means to take up space in the world as an autistic person. If Gadsby’s comedy is judged solely on neurotypical terms, it’s hardly surprising that most commentators just don’t get it.
Who Gets To Tell Our Stories
Nanette, Gadsby’s Netflix comedy debut, premiered in 2018, at the height of the #metoo movement, to almost universal acclaim. Nanette marks a before and after for Gadsby’s career, not just in terms of its unprecedented success, but because it marks Gadsby’s embrace of their own autism and Autistic Culture. While Gadsby does not mention their recent neurodivergent diagnoses in Nanette, their memoir, Ten Steps to Nanette, describes how their initial ADHD diagnosis followed by an autism diagnosis opened up a whole new way of understanding themselves and their relationship to the world.
For many late-diagnosed autistic people, the discovery of this new identity means rewriting our own narratives about ourselves and our place in the world. Gadsby used Nanette to set the record straight about themselves and their history of trauma which, until that point, had served as the source of most of Gadsby’s self-deprecating humour. Everything in Nanette, from the set design to the suit Gadsby wears, is a reflection of this new understanding.
If Nanette is a catharsis, an opportunity for Gadsby to correct the historical record they had created for themselves, then Douglas is the show where they decided to explain their experience of autism and how their autistic mind works. Even the introduction of Douglas, in which Gadsby lays out the plan and expectations for the show, is a standard practice in autistic spaces. The jokes, from confusing their teacher in the “Is the Penguin made of box?” story and the info-dump at the dog park, to the literal mic-drop moment are all autistic in-jokes. Something Special, Gadsby’s most recent Netflix special, is a celebration of autistic joy and a powerful statement that autistic people can and do fall in love. They might lose a couple of actual bunnies on the way, (Gadsby described in detail how they are responsible for at least one bunny death during the set), but they make it work. Unfortunately, most of this seems to have been lost on mainstream critics.
The tenor of these reviews adds up to an argument that Gadsby is simply doing comedy wrong. For The Baffler, it is derivative, Ted-Talky and a failure of innovation and recognition of comedians who have done the same thing before, but better. For Slate, it’s an Aussie pandering sincerity and identity politics to an overly susceptible US audience. For The New Yorker, it’s victimization dressed as comedy that’s really just a monologue. In the latter, Hilton Als refuses to concede that Gadsby is a comedian at all, and argues that Gadsby’s mentioning of their autism diagnosis was an attempt to avoid legitimate criticism of their comedy: “Of course, this confession silences or nearly silences any criticism you may have been harbouring: how can you criticize that?” The implication that someone would use their diagnosis (or any marginalised identity) to avoid criticism is, sadly, an accusation that autistic people constantly face to invalidate our feelings and experiences, to gaslight and ultimately silence us.
It’s unfortunate to read references to Gadsby’s voice, stage presence, and even set design as further evidence of how their comedy is flawed. Autistic people are constantly criticised for our tone of voice, the way we speak, move our bodies, and other forms of expression, as well as for seeking the stimuli we need to keep us calm — in this case Gadsby’s blue set and blue suit, a colour which calms them as they explain in Ten Steps to Nanette. There is nothing novel in saying an Autistic person isn’t funny. We’ve been told we’re not funny, have no imagination, and lack both empathy and creativity for decades. But why should neurotypicals be the arbiters on how autistic people do comedy or how we get to tell or stories? Gadsby is the first ‘out’ autistic comedian to become a superstar in their medium, with three Netflix specials under their belt to prove it. In a world where neurotypicals too often shape the narrative on autism, relying on tired stereotypes like Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man, Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory, or Sam from Atypical, Gadsby’s autistic self-representation in itself is novel. With few spaces or platforms for autistic people to tell our stories, it’s worrying to see so much thinly-veiled ableism in the rush to take Gadsby down.
Show Us Your Credentials
The art world has also come out in force to decry the Pablo-matic exhibition as the product of a hack with a bare-minimum knowledge of art who represents the degeneration of cultural critique into meme-speak through extensive, multi-feature reviews which continue to be churned out. I’m not going to defend an exhibition which I’ll never see. Nevertheless, the fixation on Gadsby’s presumed lack of qualifications to curate an art show is yet another example of how commentary on this exhibition has been laced with ableism. Gadsby is open about barely scraping through their art history degree in Nanette, but this should be understood as moment of self-deprecation which obscures two realities. The first is that, according to their memoir, art has been a special interest for Gadsby since they were a teenager, when it provided an imaginative and creative escape for a rather intolerable adolescence. What neurotypicals often fail to understand about autistic people’s special interests is their intensity and the fact that we can hold a depth of information on the subject of our fixation, which often matches or outdoes certified experts.
The second is the huge barriers autistic people face when it comes toto completing higher education and finding work. Gadsby pursued and finished a degree in art history but, making it to graduation was an uphill battle, as it is for many autistic people. An estimated 36% of autistic young people make it to higher education, but once there drop-out rates are worryingly high. If we do manage to finish it often takes us longer than our neurotypical peers (five instead of four years, in my case) as the social and academic demands of university often conflict with autistic sensibilities and executive dysfunction. Support systems are better now than in the past, but as an undiagnosed autistic person studying in the early 2000s, Gadsby had only themself to rely on. Upon graduation, autistic people have some of the lowest rates of employment of any disabled group. And as for accusations of Gadsby abandoning a career in the art world, their struggles to hold down regular employment after graduation are recounted in painful detail in their memoir. It wasn’t until they began to make it on the comedy circuit that they found any kind of financial and living stability.
Further criticism directed at Gadsby has focused on how the Brooklyn Museum is funded largely by the Sackler family, the founders of Purdue Pharma and Mundipharma, who profited exponentially from the US opioid epidemic. These are legitimate critiques and Gadsby’s response was wishy-washy, but they still made a valid point: “Doesn’t matter what cultural institution you work with in America, you’re going to be working with billionaires and there’s not a billionaire on this planet that is not fucked up. It is just morally reprehensible.” The history of patronage in the arts, from the Guggenheim to the Tate, is rooted in white wealth and the privilege of family dynasties whose financial gains stem from the ownership of enslaved people and the extraction of resources from indigenous lands. Why single out Gadsby to account for dubious funding when the history of western art is founded on dubious patronage and philanthropy? It’s difficult not to conclude that the attack on Gadsby’s credentials stems from the ire caused by a queer, autistic, nonbinary individual daring to take on one of the most sacred of cows in one of the most historically elitist cultural institutions.
The Great Unmasking
With Nanette, Douglas, and Something Special, as well as their memoir, Gadsby has engaged in a very public process of autistic unmasking: a conscious decision to stop hiding their authentic, autistic self. This is a vulnerable process for any autistic person who can or wants to unmask, but for someone with a public profile like Gadsby’s, this must be even more daunting.
Gadsby found acceptance and even acclaim in the neurotypical world for their comedy, honesty, vulnerability, and irreverent takedowns of traditional artistic greats. Accepting the co-curation of the Pablo-Matic exhibit must have felt like a natural progression in diversifying their career and exploring their special interest. But in stepping out of their lane and daring to comment on the world of art off-stage, Gadsby has unwittingly invited the scorn of a large cohort of culture critics who have rushed to point out all the ways Gadsby not only got it wrong, but that they are and always have been, a talentless hack.
There was something so eerily familiar in the glee and triumphalism of this take-down that it took me weeks to figure out why I was so bothered by it. Yes, I’m a Gadsby fan –I owe them my diagnosis–but I make a point of not getting caught up in the public highs and lows of celebrities’ careers. The Gadsby fall from grace, however, touched a nerve. It felt like so many moments in my own life — at home, school, work, and in social or activist spaces — when I thought I’d finally cracked the neurotypical code, finally made it according to neurotypical expectations. Then I got something wrong or took things a step too far and it all crumbled in front of my eyes.
What has actually been unmasked is the neurotypical world’s limited tolerance for neurodivergent people. The fact that this ableism remains ignored and has gone unchallenged in the media, including those responsible for reproducing this discourse is a worrying signal for any autistic person who dares to stick their head above the parapet. It sends a message to all autistic people to stay in your lane because acceptance is only ever conditional.
