Hannah Gadsby’s new stand-up show, Body of Work, is a feel-good piece. The Tasmanian comic whose Netflix special Nanette catapulted her to global fame, winning her an Emmy, and whose memoir is a New York Times bestseller, made a conscious effort to create a show that would respond to what the world needs now.

Ironically, improvements in Gadsby’s personal situation have made it harder for her to do her job. “Every show I do is about where I am in life, and it might sound odd but where my life is at at the moment, it’s very difficult to do comedy about – because by and large I’m happy. And nobody really wants to hear about that,” she says with a laugh. “People love misery.”

Although the show was written as we were coming out of lockdown, Gadsby didn’t want to dwell on that experience; she has gone back to her storytelling roots to create it, and touring it through North America this year has been a joy. “It’s doing its job, it’s putting a good feeling in the room that it’s in.”

As revealed in hilarious fashion in her memoir Ten Steps to Nanette, the world changed for Gadsby when her revolutionary show landed on Netflix back in 2018. “My life was thrown into the chaos of the new, and much bigger. Then all of a sudden, the whole world had a pandemic and the whole world changed, so coming out the other side of that I feel very disoriented because my life is so profoundly different, and also the world is so profoundly different. This show I’m using as a way of making sense of a new reality.”

The reaction to Nanette was massive: all of a sudden, she was in with the A-crowd. At a party at Eva Longoria’s house, Janelle Monae and Jodie Foster wandered over to say hi and Jennifer Aniston asked to meet her. “It felt like I was in a zoo. I would have called myself a really successful comic before all of this, so it wasn’t like I felt like I was failing … What threw me for a loop was famous people knew who I was.“

Along the way, there was a public stoush with comedian Dave Chappelle, who said she wasn’t funny, and who she later described as having an “emotionally stunted partial world view”, and then Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos.

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How is all that sitting these days, I wonder, given both Nanette and her more recent show Douglas are available to watch on the streaming giant. The Netflix that Nanette entered is a different Netflix to that which exists now, she argues. “I’m a bit sad that my work has to sit side by side with overpaid transphobic shit. But it’s an algorithm right, algorithms, they’re not focused on exploration or potential of new creativity. They double down on what already exists; that is just what it is. As a creator, I can’t sink the Titanic on my own but, you know, I’ll make it cold for them,” she says with a sly giggle. “It’s the beast. As a creator, I’ll make a stand in so many different ways … I’m choosing to do it by doing my job, just working. I don’t feel that being a voice in direct opposition is constructive because that way the toxic voices then get to control the conversation.”