It's a relief that Hannah Gadsby's Douglas doesn't have the same electrifying effect as Nanette

Vulture

Gadsby uses her second Netflix standup special, her follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2018 special Nanette, "in a more scattershot way than Nanette’s hermetic closed loop," says Kathryn VanArendonk. "It’s less organized toward a single all-encompassing goal. Much of Douglas builds toward Gadsby’s exploration and explanation of her autism diagnosis, but the show as a whole isn’t animated by that as a single narrative. As a result, Douglas feels more uneven than its famous predecessor, in a way that’s both good and bad. It is lighter, sometimes, and its heavy bits don’t carry the same weight of indicting an entire genre of writing and performance. It is emptier than Nanette. But unevenness and emptiness sound like negatives, and they’re not — there’s room in an hour-long performance for highs and lows, and of course it’s emptier than Nanette, which is by the end almost overburdened by its own weightiness." VanArendonk adds: "In all, Douglas is sillier than its predecessor, and even in the moments that feel legitimately angry or smugly self-satisfied .... the show’s comparative goofiness is a welcome direction for Gadsby. There are clunky parts, and especially toward the end there are some bits that strain a little too hard to tuck in any loose threads. But its biggest success may be that as a difficult second act, Douglas manages to pull off something that no one would’ve dared ever say about its looming, much-lauded predecessor. Douglas, while railing against the patriarchy and expounding on the blinkered social response to neurodivergence, also happens to be pretty fun."

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• Hannah Gadsby is the Michael Jordan of standup in one way — her stated plans to retire shouldn’t be taken seriously: “Douglas, her new special on Netflix, explicitly situates itself as post-Nanette, which means it must, among other things, justify its existence as the work of someone who said she was done — both good enough to bring Gadsby back and post-stand-up enough to distinguish itself as part of a project that is of comedy and apart from it. It succeeds in this, in the main," says Daniel D'Addario. "But watching Douglas onscreen (as opposed to, perhaps, being in the audience as it happens) has a somewhat distancing effect: Gadsby tends, more than ever, to generate more powerful applause lines than audience laughs, and to generate admiration more from her ability to plainly state her beliefs than through the comic sleight-of-hand at which she’s adept."
• Douglas is proof that Gadsby has incredible range outside of what she became famous for in Nanette: "With Douglas, Gadsby sharpens the edge of her socially aware comedy and doesn't fear making fun of everyone—herself included," says Justin Kirkland. "While Nanette may have come with some tears, Douglas has no time for it. The Australian comic showed how powerful comedy can be in her first outing, but this second time? Hannah Gadsby is here to make clear that she's hysterical, haters be damned. And if you don't like it, that's on you."
• Douglas is the perfect response to Nanette haters: "The fact that Douglas is so silly and funny is what makes it the perfect response to that 'not comedy' camp," says James Crowley. "It's easy to bait an audience into getting other their skin, but making an audience laugh is what makes comedy a hard job to begin with. Gadsby is funny as she makes fun of American terms like 'sweater' or 'fanny' (when referring to one's rear end) and golfers, or tells the audience a hilarious story about learning prepositions. Gadsby shows that funny comes naturally to her, and some men disliking Nanette didn't faze her."
• Douglas is a surprisingly slick, joke-dense show, running hot then cold and even chilly, periodically pausing to meditate on its changing temperature: "This new work seems less ambitious but isn’t," says Jason Zinoman. "If anything, it’s formally more complex and denser intellectually, if far less confessional. Whereas Nanette needed to stop the comedy to make its most serious points, Gadsby works hard to blend the two here, and the result is an intricate, heady show whose cleverness gets in its own way. She refers to it, aptly, as her 'difficult second album.'"
• Douglas is the Curb Your Enthusiasm to the Seinfeld of Gadsby’s Nanette: "It takes place in a world where Nanette indelibly exists, and proves what else its eccentric creator can do," says Joe Berkowitz. "Last time out, Gadsby dissected the form by illuminating how jokes are supposed to function. For her next trick, she goes macro, applying this same meta transparency to how a comedy special itself works."
• Gadsby’s special has more in common with John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight than a traditional stand-up show: "She starts with the laughs coming a mile a minute, teeing up jokes and then knocking them out the park (or whatever mixed sports metaphor you prefer)," says Patrick Gomez. "But two-thirds of the way through Douglas, Gadsby makes it clear that class is in session. And she doesn’t care that her critics on social media (mostly men who use the hashtag #NotAllMen, she points out) have insisted Nanette was not comedy but rather a 'monologue,' 'lecture,' 'one-woman show,' or 'glorified TED Talk.' She doesn’t care what you call Douglas, as long as you listen to what she has to say."
• If Nanette demonstrated Gadsby's mastery of tone and command of the audience, Douglas is an even richer showcase for the comic's technical prowess
• How Gadsby approached Douglas after the massive success of Nanette: "Every show is different and forged under different circumstances," she says. "For Douglas one of the main motivators of process was, 'How do you follow up a show like Nanette?' There were lots of other reasons but part of how I did that was just resigning myself to the fact that Nanette is probably going to be the way that people see me, — and you can’t be too upset about that. My idea was to do a completely different show, a completely different kind of show and that meant taking particularly heavy subjects and turning them over with a much, much lighter hand, without undermining them and the way I feel about them. Silliness was the main motivator. I want Douglas to be silly."
• Douglas was inspired by Gadsby’s changing understanding of herself as a person with autism: “It’s a common feeling of people on the spectrum," she says. "We do feel like we’re from another planet. Like, what is this witchcraft? Turns out, it’s just a birthday party!” Gadsby challenged herself to create a show that didn’t explain the autistic perspective so much as embody it: “That’s why I focused on the structure and the patterns.”