Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation

And I needed my audience to trust me because I needed my audience to feel safe, and I needed my audience to feel safe so that I could take that safety away and not give it back. Why? Because that is the shape of trauma.

Before Nanette made her big splash in 2018, I already had eight hour-long stand-up comedy shows sitting in my oeuvre, and four comedy-adjacent art history lectures, so I don’t think not being able to snag a set at Caroline’s on Broadway has held me back at all.

I can recognise that Mum was not always the right target, she was just the easy one.

It pains me to admit that just like everybody else I dabbled in unkindness toward Melody,

am what you could call a “festival comic,” which means I am something of a long-form comic. I don’t build sets by stacking jokes one on top of the other, I shape shows out of interconnecting material that is designed to pull an audience through a cohesive hour-long experience.

The show may not be funny, but you can’t accuse me of not knowing how to read a room.

George Carlin once said that it is the job of a comedian to find the line and then cross it. That is what I have done. The line I found is the definition of comedy itself, and given the considerable nerve I struck, I would say that makes me an excellent comedian. Except I won’t. Because I don’t think of myself as a comedian, I am a stand-up perform

Laughter is rarely benign, but it is often malicious.