ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

The new show arrives on the heels of Nanette, a comedy special which aired on Netflix last summer, sending waves through the think-piece internet and comedy Twitterverse. The special, for those who managed not to hear about it, had nothing to do with the name Nanette, and everything to do with a problem Gadsby saw in her industry--namely, an expectation that comedy minorities make themselves the butt of the joke. [...]

However people felt about Nanette, part of what made it unusual and noteworthy was Gadsby's ability to repackage an oppressively familiar theme--the sidelining of marginal voices in comedy--in a surprising, inarguably novel way. In Douglas, the comic seemed to struggle with finding a way to talk about similar subjects with equal originality, often falling back on woke cliches and one-dimensional girlbossery, as if parroting Resistance catchphrases could do both comedic and analytical labor for her. "The U.S. is the straight white man of culture," she says at one point. In another moment, while running off a series of allegedly unpopular opinions, Gadsby manages to compile an almost universally agreed upon list of enemies (bikini models, the paleo diet, golf, atheists, chivalry, Elon Musk, to name only a few). "Believe women," she adds later, almost out of the blue.

Tweet   @brothersjudd