If not for an acquaintance’s Melbourne Comedy Festival review, I would not be here right now, bingeing Taskmaster episodes like an unsupervised Labrador at a picnic.

As far as I know, comedian Hannah Gadsby has never been asked to appear on TV show Taskmaster, nor has ever expressed an interest to do so. So why do I credit them with my rampant binge-watching of the comedy-adjacent game show? Here’s an origin story, if you will.

For a long time, a very long time, I did not think stand-up comedy was for people like me. Of course I watched sitcoms and saw acts on variety shows, and have even been to the Edinburgh Fringe a few times, but the thought of buying a ticket and seeing a cis straight white man at a microphone make fun of women and queer people and ‘foreigners’ for an hour really didn’t appeal. And before you “#notallmen” me, listen: that’s how stand-up comedy (particularly ‘edgy’ comedy) was sold to the public until about a decade ago.

Case in point: this old QI clip, which irks me, as does the majority of the comments (don’t read the comments). Ronni Ancona is actually very funny with her “you can go see and adopt [female comedians]” bit and Jack Dee is simply mean-spirited. I understand Dee has a ‘grumpy persona’ but the fact that his one-liner is touted as some kind of zinger – AND gets the biggest laugh – is distasteful to me, especially considering the context, and I wonder if the studio response would be the same today.

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes. One year – maybe 2016 or 2017? – comedy critic Alex Neill decided she was going to see and review only female comedians. Now I wouldn’t have even bothered to read reviews of shows from a comedy festival in another city I didn’t intend to go to, except that Alex is an acquaintance I met (a long time ago) at the National Young Writers’ Festival and an occasional penpal, and I was intrigued by the premise. Here was someone who loved stand-up comedy as a genre trying to find out where she belonged as an audience member. What hope did I – someone who didn’t care for stand-up comedy – have?

Readers, her work literally changed the way I thought about and understood comedy. Unfortunately I can’t find the original reviews thanks to the enshittification of the internet, but here’s an essay* she wrote that encapsulates the essence of that time.

From there I streamed Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, which also reconfigured my understanding of comedy and what it could be, and then I began watching other Netflix stand-up comedy specials, which was a low-barrier way to get into the scene and figure out what I liked without shelling out $$$ and risking a night out on the wrong comedian. Thanks to the algorithm I found the work of Wanda Sykes, Iliza Shlesinger, John Mulaney, and more.

After becoming a little more comfortable with stand-up, in 2019 I went with my (Canberra-based) sister to NightFest Comedy at Floriade where one of the comics in the line-up was Urzila Carlson (the headliner was Dave Hughes, who was awful). I had just started a personal Instagram account so I started following personalities like her.

The following year was the dark days of the pandemic lockdowns. Streaming became a necessity and stand-up comedy became a genre I reached for more often. In the intervening years I discovered Ari Eldjárn, Phil Wang, Michael McIntyre, Fortune Feimster, Vir Das, Trevor Noah, Ali Wong, Mae Martin and Sarah Millican.

It was following Urzila that first gave me a taste of Taskmaster. She was on the second series of Taskmaster NZ and shared plenty of clips to her Insta feed. Phil Wang, Mae Martin and Sarah Millican also appeared (on the UK version) and shared moments. But it was not until I saw Jenny Tian, who I discovered when she opened for Hannah Gadsby’s Body of Work (filmed as Something Special for Netflix), and Jimmy Rees share clips from their time on an Australian version of the show that I realised you could watch an episode all the way through and it had a structure and format that was in total quite unhinged and a lot of fun.

So here I am with a 10Play account (for Taskmaster Australia) and a BINGE subscription (for Taskmaster UK, Junior and NZ). Taskmaster is where the nerds are in charge of comedy and comedy will never be the same for me again.

*Please note this was written before Hannah Gadsby used they/them pronouns.