Tag: #MeToo

‘Nanette’ is good

Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

What’s the difference between a joke and a story? Hannah Gadsby teaches the difference in her new stand-up special Nanette. She brings up a lot of stuff going on in current political discussions in a funny, painful, compelling performance. You will get more out of it by listening not just to the “content” she’s written and delivered—and believe it or not, she has a funny joke early on about the idea of “content” itself. You’ve also got to watch Gadsby’s non-verbal signals, the wry smiles and fleeting, then burning, eye contact as she builds to her point.

One theme running through the show is Gadsby’s stated intent to leave stand-up comedy. She unrolls the reasoning a bit at a time, moving toward her central thesis: she’s got to tell her story, and comedy doesn’t let her do that.

Why not?

What better way to tell one’s story than with humor—specifically, with jokes? They make people laugh; they make people think.

Self-deprecating jokes are causing more hurt and Gadsby states her intent not to use them anymore:

“You do understand what self -deprecation means from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation.”

That’s one of many lessons about listening tucked up in her performance. If you hear someone using self-deprecating humor, listen more closely. Listen with empathy. Why are they doing that?

But beyond the content of the joke, Gadsby says, it’s the joke itself that is the problem. A joke has a two-part structure: First, the tension. Then, the punch line that relieves tension.

That structure is missing the third part, the rest of the story. Sometimes the rest of the story is satisfying, like when she came out to her mother (producing much joke material) and later developed a great relationship with her (happy but not at all funny). And sometimes the rest of the story is really painful, such that a comedian must ignore and suppress it to get anything joke-worthy at all.

So listening for more than a joke is one thing to take away from Nanette. Listening for a joke is a way to squeeze pleasure for yourself as a listener. Some audience members seem to get even more pleasure out of judging the jokes and offering “feedback” and “opinions” to Gadsby after her shows.

But listening for a story uses your listening to help the other person share and connect. How exactly to show you, as a listener, want the story not the joke seems like it must be drawn from intuition and empathy. If your listening skills suggest that all you want or all you can handle is a joke, you’ll never get the full story.

Asking questions certainly seems like a good start. Gadsby talks a lot about the unsolicited feedback she receives, but nowhere in the performance does she recount anyone asking her a question. In a way, the whole performance constitutes an exclamation by someone who has never been asked an open question, but only placed without her consent into certain boxes and stereotypes.

I’m still processing everything I took away from Nanette, and now I get it why someone said they were going to watch the show several more times. It’s not a spoiler to share the denouement, a clip of Gadsby on a sofa with her teapot and teacup and two dogs. After the work that went into Nanette, she deserves a moment to recharge.

Here are some other reviews of Nanette that may be of interest:

https://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2018/07/02/625298708/hannah-gadsbys-nanette-is-a-scorching-piece-on-comedy-and-trauma

Hannah Gadsby on the Real ‘Nanette’ and Whether She’s Really Quitting Comedy After Her Netflix Special

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/5/17527478/hannah-gadsby-nanette-comedy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ready to listen

Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

How can I be an ally? How can I let people know I’m really ready to listen?

At the Georgia Association for Women Lawyers’ CLE on women in leadership held today at the State Bar of Georgia, several participants shared their desire to help and to listen. Discussions around #MeToo are bringing out stories suppressed sometimes for decades, stories often peeled back to more layers of race and class. Although there are no easy answers, many agreed on the value of listening. What can we do? One thing is we can listen, actively, to one another’s stories.

Then a question was raised: what if you’re ready to listen but others aren’t sharing?  “I do want to listen, I am ready to hear. But sometimes I feel people aren’t willing to speak. Maybe they think I won’t understand, or they put up a defensive barrier. How can I prove I really want to listen?”

Listening is such a gift. But—as someone pointed out from the audience—showing up to listen does not obligate others to share their stories. Receptive body language and an open heart does not guarantee others will reciprocate by speaking. Nor should it. If listening is a gift, it must be given without expectation of repayment.

At a different CLE last summer, through the International Listening Association’s annual convention, I co-presented a CLE on “Better Listening for Better Lawyering.” One of the most popular parts of the CLE, according to the feedback, was discussion of the “Preparing to Listen” checklist. People—especially task-driven, problem-solving, professional people like lawyers—just love checklists. You have a focus, broken down into small parts. You can check off the boxes. If you do everything on that checklist, you’re prepared to listen. Right?

That checklist is great, and many people are failing miserably at doing half the tasks it lists. Atul Gawande popularized checklists as a lifesaving measure in surgical units, citing evidence they work because they catch “the dumb stuff.” In the world of listening, “dumb stuff” means looking at your phone or starting a conversation by telling someone they don’t look like a lawyer—another story shared at the GAWL session today.

But today’s conversation also revealed, yet again, that listening is more than checking off boxes. Avoiding the “dumb stuff” is not quite the path to the authentic, vulnerable speaking and listening.

Panelist Gwendolyn Keyes Fleming offered a response that transcends checklists and neat reciprocal obligations: Readiness to listen means being there. It means finding “small points of common interest” with the people around you. It means putting in the work “day by day.”

Someone chimed in that change comes from individual relationships, not the top down. I’m not sure I agree with giving up on top-down measures. But I agree change won’t happen without the relationships—the kind that are built through small, incremental, meaningful gifts of attention and recognition. And perhaps, when the moment is right, speaking and listening.