-
My name is Hannah.
-
And that is a palindrome.
-
That is a word you can spell
the same forwards and backwards,
-
if you can spell.
-
But the thing is --
-
(Laughter)
-
my entire family have palindromic names.
-
It's a bit of a tradition.
-
We've got Mum, Dad --
-
(Laughter)
-
Nan, Pop.
-
(Laughter)
-
And my brother, Kayak.
-
(Laughter)
-
There you go.
-
That's just a bit a joke, there.
-
(Laughter)
-
I like to kick things off with a joke
because I'm a comedian.
-
Now there's two things
you know about me already:
-
my name's Hannah and I'm a comedian.
-
I'm wasting no time.
-
Here's a third thing
you can know about me:
-
I don't think I'm qualified
to speak my own mind.
-
Bold way to begin a talk, yes,
-
but it's true.
-
I've always had a great deal of difficulty
-
turning my thinking into the talking.
-
So it seems a bit
of a contradiction, then,
-
that someone like me,
who is so bad at the chat,
-
could be something like
a stand-up comedian.
-
But there you go. There you go.
-
It's what it is.
-
I first tried my hand at stand-up
comedi -- comedie ... See?
-
See? See?
-
(Laughter)
-
I first tried my hand at stand-up comedy
-
in my late 20s,
-
and despite being a pathologically shy
virtual mute with low self-esteem
-
who'd never held a microphone before,
-
I knew as soon as I walked
and stood in front of the audience,
-
I knew, before I'd even
landed my first joke,
-
I knew that I really liked stand-up,
-
and stand-up really liked me.
-
But for the life of me,
I couldn't work out why.
-
Why is it I could be so good
at doing something I was so bad at?
-
(Laughter)
-
I just couldn't work it out,
I could not understand it.
-
That is, until I could.
-
Now, before I explain to you why it is
-
that I can be good
at something I'm so bad at,
-
let me throw another spanner
of contradiction into the work
-
by telling you that not long after
I worked out why that was,
-
I decided to quit comedy.
-
And before I explain
that little oppositional cat
-
I just threw amongst the thinking pigeons,
-
let me also tell you this:
-
quitting launched my comedy career.
-
(Laughter)
-
Like, really launched it, to the point
where after quitting comedy,
-
I became the most talked-about
comedian on the planet,
-
because apparently, I'm even worse
at making retirement plans
-
than I am at speaking my own mind.
-
Now, all I've done up until this point
-
apart from giving over a spattering
of biographical detail
-
is to tell you indirectly
that I have three ideas
-
that I want to share with you today.
-
And I've done that by way of sharing
three contradictions:
-
one, I am bad at talking,
I am good at talking;
-
I quit, I did not quit.
-
Three ideas, three contradictions.
-
Now, if you're wondering
why there's only two things
-
on my so-called list of three --
-
(Laughter)
-
I remind you it is literally
a list of contradictions.
-
Keep up.
-
(Laughter)
-
Now, the folks at TED advised me
that with a talk of this length,
-
it's best to stick
with just sharing one idea.
-
I said no.
-
(Laughter)
-
What would they know?
-
To explain why I have chosen to ignore
what is clearly very good advice,
-
I want to take you back
to the beginning of this talk,
-
specifically, my palindrome joke.
-
Now that joke uses my favorite trick
of the comedian trade,
-
the rule of three,
-
whereby you make a statement
-
and then back that statement up
-
with a list.
-
My entire family have palindromic names:
-
Mum, Dad, Nan, Pop.
-
The first two ideas on that list
create a pattern,
-
and that pattern creates expectation.
-
And then the third thing -- bam! --
Kayak. What?
-
That's the rule of three.
-
One, two, surprise! Ha ha.
-
(Laughter)
-
Now, the rule of three is not only
fundamental to the way I do my craft,
-
it is also fundamental
to the way I communicate.
-
So I won't be changing
anything for nobody,
-
not even TED,
-
which, I will point out,
stands for three ideas:
-
technology, entertainment
-
and dickheads.
-
(Laughter)
-
Works every time, doesn't it?
-
But you need more than just jokes
-
to be able to cut it
as a professional comedian.
-
You need to be able to walk
that fine line between being charming
-
and disarming.
-
And I discovered the most effective way
to generate the amount of charm I needed
-
to offset my disarming personality
-
was through not jokes but stories.
-
So my stand-up routines
are filled with stories:
-
stories about growing up,
my coming out story,
-
stories about the abuse I've copped
for being not only a woman
-
but a big woman
and a masculine-of-center woman.
-
If you watch my work online,
check the comments out below
-
for examples of abuse.
-
(Laughter)
-
It's that time in the talk
where I shift into second gear,
-
and I'm going to tell you a story
about everything I've just said.
-
In the last few days of her life,
-
my grandma was surrounded by people,
-
a lot of people,
-
because my grandma
was the loving matriarch
-
of a large and loving family.
-
Now, if you haven't made
the connection already,
-
I am a member of that family.
-
I was lucky enough to be able
to say goodbye to my grandma
-
on the day she died.
-
But as she was already
cocooned within herself by then,
-
it was something of a one-sided goodbye.
-
So I thought about a lot of things,
-
things I hadn't thought about
in a long time,
-
like the letters I used
to write to my grandma
-
when I first started university,
-
letters I filled with funny
stories and anecdotes
-
that I embellished for her amusement.
-
And I remembered how I couldn't articulate
-
the anxiety and fear that filled me
as I tried to carve my tiny little life
-
into a world that felt far too big for me.
-
But I remembered finding
comfort in those letters,
-
because I wrote them
with my grandma in mind.
-
But as the world got
more and more overwhelming
-
and my ability to negotiate it
got worse, not better,
-
I stopped writing those letters.
-
I just didn't think I had the life
that Grandma would want to read about.
-
Grandma did not know I was gay,
-
and about six months before she died,
-
out of nowhere, she asked me
if I had a boyfriend.
-
Now, I remember making
a conscious decision in that moment
-
not to come out to my grandmother.
-
And I did that because I knew her life
was drawing to an end,
-
and my time with her was finite,
-
and I did not want to talk about
the ways we were different.
-
I wanted to talk about
the ways were we connected.
-
So I changed the subject.
-
And at the time, it felt
like the right decision.
-
But as I sat witness
to my grandmother's life
-
as it tapered to its inevitable end,
-
I couldn't help but feel
I'd made a mistake
-
not to share such a significant
part of my life.
-
But I also knew that
I'd missed my opportunity,
-
and as Grandma always used to say,
-
"Ah, well, it's all part of the soup.
-
Too late to take the onions out now."
-
(Laughter)
-
And I thought about that,
-
and I thought about how
I had to deal with too many onions
-
as a kid,
-
growing up gay in a state
where homosexuality was illegal.
-
And with that thought,
I could see how tightly wrapped
-
in the tendrils of my own
internalized shame I was.
-
And with that, I thought
about all my traumas:
-
the violence, the abuse, my rape.
-
And with all that cluster of thinking,
-
a thought, a question,
kept popping into my mind
-
to which I had no answer:
-
What is the purpose of my human?
-
Out of anyone in my family,
I felt the most akin to my grandmother.
-
I mean, we share the most
traits in common.
-
Not so much these days.
-
Death really changes people.
-
But that --
-
(Laughter)
-
is my grandmother's sense of humor.
-
But the person I felt
most akin to in the world
-
was a mother, a grandmother,
a great-grandmother,
-
a great-great-grandmother.
-
Me? I represented the very end
of my branch of the family tree.
-
And I wasn't entirely sure
I was still connected to the trunk.
-
What was the purpose of my human?
-
The year after my grandmother's death
was the most intensely creative
-
of my life.
-
And I suppose that's because,
at an end, my thoughts gather
-
more than they scatter.
-
My thought process is not linear.
-
I'm a visual thinker. I see my thoughts.
-
I don't have a photographic memory,
-
and nor is my head a static gallery
of sensibly collected think pieces.
-
It's more that I've got this ever-evolving
language of hieroglyphics
-
that I've developed
-
and can understand fluently
and think deeply with.
-
but I struggle to translate.
-
I can't paint, draw, sculpt,
or even haberdash,
-
and as for the written word,
-
I'm OK at it but it's a tortuous
process of translation,
-
and I don't feel it does the job.
-
And as far as speaking my own mind,
like I said, I'm not great at it.
-
Speech has always felt
like an inadequate freeze-frame
-
for the life inside of me.
-
All this to say,
-
I've always understood far more
than I've ever been able to communicate.
-
Now, about a year before Grandma died,
-
I was formally diagnosed with autism.
-
Now for me, that was mostly good news.
-
I always thought that I couldn't
sort my life out like a normal person
-
because I was depressed and anxious.
-
But it turns out
-
I was depressed and anxious
-
because I couldn't sort my life out
like a normal person,
-
because I was not a normal person,
-
and I didn't know it.
-
Now, this is not to say
I still don't struggle.
-
Every day is a bit of a struggle,
-
to be honest.
-
But at least now I know
what my struggle is,
-
and getting to the starting line
of normal is not it.
-
My struggle is not to escape the storm.
-
My struggle is to find the eye
of the storm as best I can.
-
Now, apart from the usual way
us spectrum types find our calm --
-
repetitive behaviors, routine
and obsessive thinking --
-
I have another surprising doorway
into the eye of the storm:
-
stand-up comedy.
-
And if you need any more proof
I'm neurodivergent, yes,
-
I am calm doing a thing
that scares the hell out of most people.
-
I'm almost dead inside up here.
-
(Laughter)
-
Diagnosis gave me a framework
on which to hang bits of me
-
I could never understand.
-
My misfit suddenly had a fit,
-
and for a while, I got giddy
with a newfound confidence
-
I had in my thinking.
-
But after Grandma died,
that confidence took a dive,
-
because thinking is how I grieve.
-
And in that grief of thought,
-
I could suddenly see with so much clarity
-
just how profoundly isolated I was
and always had been.
-
What was the purpose of my human?
-
I began to think a lot about how autism
and PTSD have so much in common.
-
And I started to worry,
-
because I had both.
-
Could I ever untangle them?
-
I'd always been told
that the way out of trauma
-
was through a cohesive narrative.
-
I had a cohesive narrative,
-
but I was still at the mercy
of my traumas.
-
They're all part of my soup,
but the onions still stung.
-
And at that point, I realized
-
that I'd been telling
my stories for laughs.
-
I'd been trimming away the darkness,
cutting away the pain
-
and holding on to my trauma
for the comfort of my audience.
-
I was connecting
other people through laughs,
-
yet I remained profoundly disconnected.
-
What was the purpose of my human?
-
I did not have an answer,
-
but I had an idea.
-
I had an idea to tell my truth,
-
all of it,
-
not to share laughs but to share
the literal, visceral pain of my trauma.
-
And I thought the best way to do that
would be through a comedy show.
-
And that is what I did.
-
I wrote a comedy show
that did not respect the punchline,
-
that line where comedians are expected
and trusted to pull their punches
-
and turn them into tickles.
-
I did not stop.
-
I punched through that line
-
into the metaphorical guts of my audience.
-
I did not want to make them laugh.
-
I wanted to take their breath away,
-
to shock them,
-
so they could listen to my story
and hold my pain
-
as individuals, not
as a mindless, laughing mob.
-
And that's what I did,
and I called that show "Nanette."
-
Now, many --
-
(Applause)
-
Now, many have argued
-
that "Nanette" is not a comedy show.
-
And while I can agree "Nanette"
is definitely not a comedy show,
-
those people are still wrong --
-
(Laughter)
-
because they have framed their argument
-
as a way of saying I failed to do comedy.
-
I did not fail to do comedy.
-
I took everything I knew about comedy --
-
all the tricks, the tools, the know-how --
-
I took all that, and with it,
I broke comedy.
-
You cannot break comedy with comedy
-
if you fail at comedy.
-
Flaccid be thy hammer.
-
(Laughter) (Applause)
-
That was not my point.
-
The point was not simply to break comedy.
-
The point was to break comedy
so I could rebuild it and reshape it,
-
reform it into something
that could better hold everything
-
I needed to share,
-
and that is what I meant
when I said I quit comedy.
-
Now, it's probably at this point
where you're going, "Yeah, cool,
-
but what are the three ideas, exactly?
-
It's a bit vague."
-
I'm glad I pretended you asked.
-
(Laughter)
-
Now, I'm sure there's quite a few of you
who have already identified three ideas.
-
A smart crowd, by all accounts,
-
so I wouldn't be surprised at all.
-
But you might be surprised to find out
that I don't have three ideas.
-
I told you I had three ideas,
and that was a lie.
-
That was pure misdirection --
I'm very funny.
-
What I've done instead is I've taken
whole handfuls of my ideas as seeds,
-
and I've scattered them
all throughout my talk.
-
And why did I do that?
-
Well, apart from shits and giggles,
-
it comes down to something
my grandma always used to say.
-
"It's not the garden,
it's the gardening that counts."
-
And "Nanette" taught me
the truth to that truism.
-
I fully expected by breaking
the contract of comedy
-
and telling my story
in all its truth and pain
-
that that would push me further
into the margins of both life and art.
-
I expected that, and I was willing to pay
that cost in order to tell my truth.
-
But that is not what happened.
-
The world did not push me away.
It pulled me closer.
-
Through an act of disconnection,
I found connection.
-
And it took me a long time to understand
-
that what is at the heart
of that contradiction
-
is also at the heart of the contradiction
-
as to why I can be so good
at something I am so bad at.
-
You see, in the real world,
-
I struggle to talk to people
-
because my neurodiversity
makes it difficult for me to think,
-
listen, speak and process new information
-
all at the same time.
-
But onstage, I don't have to think.
-
I prepare my thinks well in advance.
-
I don't have to listen. That is your job.
-
(Laughter)
-
And I don't really have to talk,
-
because, strictly speaking, I'm reciting.
-
So all that is left
-
is for me to do my best
-
to make a genuine connection
with my audience.
-
And if the experience of "Nanette"
taught me anything,
-
it's that connection depends
not just on me.
-
You play a part.
-
"Nanette" may have begun in me,
-
but she now lives and grows
in a whole world of other minds,
-
minds I do not share.
-
But I trust I am connected.
-
And in that, she is so much
bigger than me,
-
just like the purpose of being human
is so much bigger than all of us.
-
Make of that what you will.
-
Thank you, and hello.
-
(Applause)