1. “Quitting launched my comedy career”

Explaining one of her life’s biggest contradictions, she said: “After quitting comedy I became the most talked about comedian on the planet. Because, I’m even worse at making retirement plans than I am at speaking my own mind.”

2. “Ah well, it’s all part of the soup – too late to take the onions out now”

Gadbsy recalled how, when she was at university, she used to write funny letters to her late grandmother because she was unable to properly articulate how she actually felt, saying: “I just didn’t think I had the life that grandma would want to read about. Grandma did not know I was gay.” Describing why she didn’t tell her grandma that she was gay before she died, Gadsby added: “I couldn’t help feel I’d made a mistake not to share such a significant part of my life.” She then shared her grandma’s poignant and touching saying about not fishing regrets out of the soup.

3. “Speech has always felt like an inadequate freeze-frame for the life inside of me”

Beautifully articulating how her mind works with autism, Gadbsy said: “My thought process is not linear, I’m a visual thinker – I see thoughts.” She added: “I use an ever-evolving language of hieroglyphics that I’ve developed and I can understand fluently and think deeply with - but I struggle to translate.”

4. “What was the purpose of my human?”

This is the question that Gadbsy asked herself, which led to putting Nanette together. “I realised that I’ve been telling my stories for laughs. I’ve 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 but I remained profoundly disconnected,” she said. “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 was with a comedy show.”

5. “I wrote a show that did not respect the punchline”

“That line [is] 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,” said Gadbsy. “I did not want to make them laugh. I wanted to take their breath away, to shock them – so that they would listen to my story and hold my pain as individuals and not as a laughing mod. That’s what I did, and I called that show Nanette.”

Image: Getty

Podcast fans, rejoice: Hannah Gadbsy will headline The Guilty Feminist special