I am not alone

Well, the odd things you sometimes find via Twitter.

Turns out that Hannah Gadsby does get negative reviews, even from high minded reviewers who seem to have approached her work wanting to like it, after all.   This one, about her latest show, is in the New Yorker, and it's pretty strong:

Gadsby, in her work, espouses a kind of puritan-minded radicalism in which someone else is always to blame for how messed up she feels. But isn’t that messed-up feeling life? And what about other lives? What about the millions who have it worse, who are fighting to survive? On Gadsby’s stage, solipsism masquerades as art.

Then there is this review of the ridiculously over-praised Nanette, which is ever fiercer:

Nanette is awful, and it’s time we gave ourselves permission to think and say that out loud. Its few patches of genuine comedy eventually lead to giant yawning holes of intellectual chicanery masquerading as Deep and Profound Thought. Nanette assures viewers, especially straight ones, that queers and women can and must be understood and assimilated by first understanding us as uniquely and literally broken and bashed in. It isn’t comedy that is broken in Nanette, but queer life and feminism. Worse, the breaking of queerness comes about via Gadsby offering straight people in particular the assurance that this is a globally universal experience. Gadsby offers Nanette as a mirror to herself, and her self becomes a stand in for queers and women everywhere. If she had simply discussed her own story, Nanette would simply be an account of one woman’s trauma, but Gadsby takes it much, much further. She frames her story in a very particular, prescriptive, and retrograde vision of sexuality (“homosexuality is not a choice”) and in a denunciation of art that looks like a massive feminist takedown of male artists but is in fact embedded in a vision of the self that allows no place for the fragmented and fragmentary nature of experience and life itself.

Of course, the view of this queer reviewer that "homosexuality is not a choice" is a retrograde vision of sexuality may be controversial, but I'll still go with any review that points out the comedy empress has no clothes.   (So to speak.  No body size joke intended.  Well, not much.)