Hannah Gadsby: Douglas

She delivers on everything she promises. Gadsby transitions from section to section of her 10th comedy tour with an ease that seems almost stream of consciousness. It’s evident that she’s meticulously worked out every word choice and carefully crafted unexpected callbacks of jokes from a half hour earlier, but she also remains flexible.

This new special is Gadsby's version of a crowd-pleaser, and it's consistently, even boastfully, hilarious. ... 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.

It’s a well-constructed set, with a high hit-rate of jokes. Even the weaker, cruder sections – those laying into golfers and anti-vaxxers – are redeemed by neat one-liners.

Douglas has the thoughtful craft and righteous anti-patriarchy anger you'd expect from the person who made Nanette, but it has a lighter touch, a looser structure, and no moment like the climax of Nanette in which she doesn't tell jokes, only truth.

As Gadsby herself explains over the first 15 or so minutes of Douglas, though, don’t expect a rehash of her American breakthrough. Expect something that’s funnier than Nanette, still passionate but not quite as much so, and that lies undeniably in its shadow.

“Douglas” indicates the limits of her humor in covering over the limits of her project when it comes to redressing all the ills she wants to fix. The applause ringing through “Douglas” suggests that what one comes to Gadsby for is the humor, but what one leaves with, by the artist’s own design, is a sense of having done activism simply by agreeing with her.