Great Report : BarBra Streisand just announced her 4 months pregnant the responsible of the pregnancy….
because I have a life now that is very different. I’ve moved out of an economic bracket that was a hustle and a struggle. The question I had to ask every day was: How? How am I going to do this? How am I going to make ends meet? How am I going to sell tickets? How, how, how, how.
And now it’s become why, which is a position of extreme privilege and one that I’m grappling with in this show.
Has fame changed who you are as a person?
Gadsby: I guess so because, I think it just puts weird emphasis on parts of your life that didn’t even exist before. It’s just a different view, like, you’re up here now. So to connect to others, you look down, which is a weird concept isn’t it? It’s metaphorical, like, I’m quite tall, but I try not to look down on people.
Because it (fame) happened so late in life, sometimes I worry like, ‘Is this really self indulgent?’ It’s so hyper specific. My life just keeps getting more aggressively idiosyncratic, and I’m in the business of real talk, you know? But my life isn’t real anymore.
But because it happened so late in life, I’m not searching for who I am. I’m 46, and I feel like I’m now in a position and a maturity to help younger people find their way in the world. But I don’t understand the world. It’s changed so much in the last seven years. Even if you look in my industry, the way that young comics have to get their work out in the world is so different to how I had to do it, so, like, I feel like a grandfather before my time.
In the show you make a few references to Barbra Streisand. Why Barbra Streisand?
Gadsby: Well, the show began as an exercise in parasocial relationships. I just listened to her audiobook, and I thought that as a piece of work it was one of the most remarkable things I’ve experienced because she’s definitely a person that is focused on what she’s focused on — whether it be Marlon Brando or potato, you know? I just really felt, like, this intimacy that sort of works as this rich underpinning for this incredible oeuvre that has spanned an incredible time in the world, like, the last half of the 20th century. In the sense of history, it’s this huge change moment and we are living in a world that is so dramatically different
Gadsby: It is a vastly different world out there for new comedians. If anything, they’re going to be the ones who I will learn off. They’re so reliant on the audiences they build themselves, but those audiences don’t necessarily go out to see comedy, and attention is so much different now. My advice would be to resist what seems to work now because the landscape is so changeable and people’s attention is hopping all over the place and the algorithms pretend they can predict what people want, but really what they’re doing is making everything boring. It depends what you want out of your career. If you want to be interesting, see what works and try something else. Find your voice first, but how you do that I wouldn’t know.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Gadsby: I’m only just starting to unravel what happened to me. In its own way, success was a traumatic experience — not in the sense that it’s all negative, but it is in the case that it’s difficult to comprehend or prepare for or understand. I don’t think we’re psychologically equipped to understand that we’re being perceived by as many people as we are. It’s an insanity.
You can’t comprehend this amount of people and yet you’re talking intimately to them. There’s an element of faith in that, you know, sending your little signals out and the faith that they’ll land in the right harbors even, as you know, that it’ll land on hostile shores at the same time.
So the thing about success is — in all that trauma, you then will have the means to insulate yourself and protect yourself in a way. But it’s all new, and I guess what we’re learning here is I shouldn’t go back to talk to my former self because I probably wouldn’t do anything. I’d go, ‘That sounds like too much.’ I think it’s best if I don’t imagine what’s going to happen because not doing anything is my superpower.
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