Status Update

Hannah Gadsby's fascinatingly untidy tour through life after fame and death.

THE FIRST HALF-HOUR the first half-hour or so of Hannah Gadsby’s new show could be mistaken for a shift in their comedic work. The jokes are meandering and topical—there’s serviceable material on abortion policy in the U.S., Gadsby’s takeaways from the Barbie movie (less about feminism than about plastic), and some musings on whales. It’s heavily referential, including a stretch about Taylor Swift. There’s material about social media (“Where neurotypical people go to experience the worst of autism”). It does the famouscomedian move of joking about sex to stay relatable. In Woof!, there’s plenty of Gadsby’s flair for jokes that call forward to later parts of the show and circle back on themselves, but it doesn’t have the feeling of a slowly burning fuse that characterizes the opening of their first special, Nanette, or the Tristram Shandy– esque metastructure of Douglas, their second. (Gadsby’s third, 2023’s Something Special, was more of an attempt to get back on the horse than their best work.)

But as Woof! spins on, the things that make it unmistakably a Hannah Gadsby show become clearer. It’s looser structurally than their past work, more of a diaristic stroll through their brain than a sprung trap. Yet the show still coalesces around a set of ideas about grappling with change. While unlikely to set the world on fire in the way Nanette did, it’s more ambitious and striking than Gadsby’s work has been since.