Lady Haha

HOW FUNNY WERE the jokes? They were very funny. We all held our stomachs, threw back our heads and hooted with laughter. But I cannot tell you even one of the jokes. The comedian wants them kept secret. They’re only for women, and that too for those with invitation. None of the content is meant to be put online; that’s the whole point of the ‘cult’. What I can tell you is that Disgust Me, by Sumukhi Suresh, which was performed recently in Bengaluru was—to rephrase the promo—a cult where we let go, laughed at that crass joke, and did not worry about looking appropriate. How to get an invitation: if you’re a woman, shoot an email to the team asking for one.

Upon entry, everyone is given what resembled a tiny penis on a short silky lanyard and encouraged to wear it around their necks. Within five minutes of making her entrance, Suresh will say ours is a small country, referring to the tiny organs. It sets the tone for the rest of the hour-something stand-up comedy show, where she talks to the audience and hands out goodie bags filled with honey and sex toys. The confident, confidante manner Suresh adopts on stage makes it an enjoyable hour. As expected, there are countless jokes about penises and boyfriends/husbands and blow jobs and going down and the marriage market and suchlike. There are jokes about nose poop and a story of bed-wetting thrown in.

Suresh started Disgust Me because at one of her other shows, she noticed that some women were uncomfortable laughing at sex jokes when there were men around. So she designed this as a place where they didn’t have to worry about being judged for enjoying dirty jokes. The ticklers centre around ‘taboos’ that Suresh’s mother told her were too disgusting to retell, and she encourages her cheering audience to either enjoy them or be disgusted, like her mother would be.

From making her mark at Improv, a desi version of Who’s Line is it Anyway? (the immensely popular impromptu comedy show where actors have to enact situations that the audience gives them) to having a couple of viral videos to her credit, Suresh is one of a fast-expanding tribe of women who are gaining fame and followings for their comedy shows.

“It is like a sperm. Just one in a million. Then why is it getting so many views?” Suresh had complained, showing me a ten-second clip on her phone a few months ago. In the video, she is draped in a starched white sari with a golden border, the kind worn in Kerala— not her home state—and sings a classical Carnatic version of My Humps, the Black Eyed Peas song. Hashtagged #TheClassicalSeries, she made the clip because she had a few hours to kill, and uploaded it on her Facebook page. The number stands at a million-plus views as I write this.

Even in the unpredictable world of viral videos, Suresh has hit the jackpot a couple of times over. It first happened with her short video of a character called Anu Aunty—a middle-aged woman, more a family friend than a relative— who nags a young boy about studying to be an engineer or a doctor, though he would rather be an entrepreneur and start something of his own. Her portrayal of Anu Aunty was instantly relatable to young people who are forced by the family into these professions because they are a ticket to wealth, a good spouse and elevated social status. In a middle-class India that is still hugely aspirational, Anu Aunty is every neighbourhood nag whose curiosity and interference in others’ lives is relentless and irritating. Suresh’s latest sketch series called Behti Naak where she plays an annoying, arrogant young girl with a runny nose.

The popularity of such videos and the spurt in the number of stand-up comedy shows in Tier I and II cities in India speak of a country that has embraced comedy in English as a new, delectable form of entertainment. Nearly all the metro cities have comedy clubs that exclusively host sketches, improvs and stand-up acts. That an increasing number of these shows are headlined by women comedians speaks loudly of a society that has started to laugh with women, and not just at them.

Bollywood cinema is a mirror that reflects the trends of the day, even if they are largely misleading and inaccurate. In movies, the female character who was—most often, if not always—‘fat’, darker skinned and not ‘conventionally’ pretty was the preferred comic relief. A puny male comedian, sometimes her love interest, nearly always laughed at her, and moviegoers laughed with him. The stereotypes of the comic, just like the roles of the virgin heroine and the sexually liberated vamp, remain watertight compartments in popular culture, in both Bollywood and mainstream regional language cinema. The immensely popular male comedians, both of yesteryears and today, owe much of their careers to sets that mock wives and mistresses and their attempts at housekeeping, child rearing and money management, the last of which they were deemed too stupid to be trusted with anyway.

Over the last few years, women like Sumukhi Suresh, Punya Arora, Neeti Palta, Anu Menon, Radhika Vaz, Aditi Mittal and others have broken the glass ceiling, turning misogynistic comedy on its head and laughing all the way to fame. Not that the road is smooth, not at all, say the comedians I talk to. But they are ready for the fight, and are unwilling to be bullied by male audiences or be defined by their gender. This is a battle that even the likes of Ellen DeGeneres, Melissa McCarthy, Tina Fey and Amy Schumer are waging in the West.

Punya Arora is an underwater photographer who got curious about stand-up comedy, tried it at an open mic night and fell in love with the format. Raised by a single mother who got divorced because her husband wanted a son and wasn’t thrilled about having a daughter instead, Arora was encouraged never to let gender define her, or her choice of profession. “I have a very supportive mom,” she says when I ask her if her family is okay with her performing on stage. I ask because a lot of jokes these women comedians make use words like ‘fuck’, ‘vagina’, ‘sex’—words still taboo and rarely spoken aloud in public in India, and certainly not by ‘good’ girls. An aunt did ask her what her ‘marriage plan’ was, and she answered that she had a life plan instead. The common belief is that stand-up comedy is something some women dabble in before settling down into marriage and kids. “My mother thinks I am going through a phase,” says Suresh, admitting that her family doesn’t know the full extent of her stand- up career. She has women coming up to her after her shows, asking her to tone it down out of respect for her future in- laws. “I am more afraid of the women in the audience. Female comedians badly need women to back them,” she adds. ‘Who will marry you?’ is an unasked but implied question for young women who are on stage, sometimes in bars, late into the night, telling jokes about their lady parts and the things they do with men.

Radhika Vaz, one of the first women comedians in the country to gain widespread popularity, was in her late thirties, married, and hence “didn’t give a fuck” when she started doing stand-up. “I had the advantage of being older, and also had female role models (in New York where she started her career) who said anything they wanted. They were not held back by being women,” she says, admitting that she got lucky that way. India and the unspoken rules that define a woman’s behaviour in public, and at home, were not even on her mind.

Vaz’s sets are deeply personal and her humour often goes after three targets: marriage, children and ageing. The underlying feminism is unmissable and some jokes are dark. Given the baggage associated with the word ‘feminism’, is she one? I ask. “It is a simple word, the simplest word in the whole fucking world, pardon my French,” she says, explaining why being a feminist is so important in a patriarchal world. “Patriarchy is a worldwide issue and that is why feminism is important. I am a feminist, I am just a feminist,” she reiterates.

In her show Unladylike, like the title, she talks about issues that are deemed to be too ‘improper’ for women to talk about. Her show and sketches crackle with smart lines on virginity, nipple hair, the Brazilian wax, and how a full shave looks like “two chicken breasts squashed together”. ‘Brazen’ and ‘bold’ are hasty descriptions for her work, for Vaz only broaches topics that should be normal, not embarrassing or shameful to address.

What is life like on stage? Vaz says that she came to the party with husband, in- laws and parents. “I have an independent streak, and my husband is a lot like that as well. He manages all my shows and everyone knows what is happening [with the jokes]. As for my in-laws, they live in denial.” I could almost hear her grinning into the phone.

Vaz was a pioneer in the field and paved the road for those after her, I point out. “I don’t think the road has been paved yet,” she says, believing that India as a society and as an audience will take a little more time to accept performers like her.

The content that these women write invariably becomes personal and feministic. Arora talks a lot about single parenthood. Suresh addresses her plus-size body and moves on to tackle mundane issues, ending with something dark and feministic to “shock-and-surprise”.

They all love that more women have taken to the mic over the past couple of years. “We need more female comedians because we need more work. We need to understand that,” Suresh says, adding that the real challenge will be when the numbers are higher, which is when the quality of the content will be the only thing that will count. Their audience is still restricted to niche, English-speaking crowds, a fact that Vaz acknowledges as well. “English is the only language I speak fluently and it is a bit of a handicap. But I have performed in places that are not Delhi or Mumbai, where the audience may not be limited to an English-speaking crowd,” she says.

Social media has played a crucial role in their success. Vaz, who makes fun of her anger management issues, tells me that it’s “great to write something” on Twitter and let it out. One-liners on current affairs apart, a lot of the sketches that they write and produce and upload on YouTube add to their popularity, in turn giving them more shows and serving to expand their fan base.

With women cutting their teeth in yet another male bastion, what do men think? “They are very, very supportive. Blanket rule,” Suresh says, an observation that others echo as well.

It might be a tiny section of modernised, liberated urban India that is laughing with these women, be it on their shows, through columns and books—like those of Twinkle Khanna—or on social media. In an open culture, what gender precedes a job description ought not to matter. But for now, it does matters. And that is why every laugh at these shows is a loud war cry asking for the fall of patriarchy.

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