Breaking the ice

Last year Hannah Gadsby’s Fringe set found fodder in a coast-to-coast walk of England. Self-professedly clumsy and accident-prone, the Tasmanian standup doesn't shy away from stepping out of her comfort zone, and this year she’s plunging into the more psychologically punishing field of polite social exchanges. 

Mrs Chuckles is a show in part devoted to her failure at chit-chat. This doesn’t bode well for an interview, but I’m working off a script. We’re going to get through this. 

“I struggle with small talk,” Gadsby tells me over Skype from Adelaide. “The show’s about trying to overcome it. Not just the actual conversations; the worst thing about my small talk is that I don’t know how to leave the situation.”

I picture us locked in an infinite Skype chat, Gadsby’s likable earnest face forever peeking over the rim of my browser. So she just keeps talking? “No. I just walk away without saying anything. It’s really rude and I’ve been called out so many times about it.”

I tender some hackneyed British tips of talking about the weather. Incidentally, Hannah, how’s the weather? “Cold. Coming into winter.” This pause might be where Gadsby would skedaddle.  

But she turns out to be an affable and expansive interviewee, considerably smilier than the deadpan, cynical standup persona who’ll describe her own pubic triangle with all the enthusiasm of a maths teacher calling the roll.

On the comedy circuit some five years now, she ladles out physical embarrassments alongside slices of small-town life, and earlier this year took the enviable position of Adam Hills’s sidekick on his new Aussie chat show Gordon St Tonight.

Isn’t it ironic that someone so bad at small talk now works on a chat show? “No, I’m just a smart-arse in the corner on that one. Adam’s lovely and warm and generous and I sort of sit as a counter-balance to that.”

Smart indeed – when not curating her own gallery of humiliations with standup, her second show at this year’s Fringe will see Gadsby lecture on depictions of the Virgin Mary in classical Western art.

“I studied art history at university. I wanted to be a curator, and I discovered during my degree that I wasn’t going to be. I couldn’t take it seriously enough, and you’ve got to be very serious to work in a gallery. You’ve got to be able to wear scarves. I can’t wear scarves.” 

Gadsby’s found a way round this scarf conundrum with her own take on art that is part-comic, part-factual – dare wesay infotainment?

“There’s a trap that you could undermine the information with the cheap gag—sometimes I do—but it’s more trying to add to the experience as opposed to sabotaging the information.”  

The ubiquitous Virgin Mary allows Gadsby to take a lively overview of Western painting.

“You can see it develop nicely through her; she starts off as a mosaic and ends up as a bit of a whorish-looking thing with some of the Caravaggio paintings. She stands at a very problematic point for women, being pretty much the only visible woman in Christianity. And she doesn’t have a lot of fun.”

Gadsby, however, is having a lot of fun. At the Melbourne Comedy Festival she gave similar lectures at the National Gallery of Victoria, charging Australian art history with her own brand of jaunty irreverence.

“I think art does get taken too seriously. Art galleries are such solemn places. People are intimidated. People who talk about art like to maintain that level of superiority. They like to think that art’s a special knowledge and it should be inaccessible,” she tells me offhandedly.

“Basically there’s a lot of wankers who talk about art. I like the fact that you can actually go to a gallery, see a piece of work, not understand it, but still have a valid response to it. People should trust their instincts with art. I think humour’s a great way for cutting down the wank around it.” 

A wanker-free lecture on the Virgin Mary? It might just be what the Fringe has been missing.