Every October is breast cancer awareness month. It started in the United States in 1985 to raise funds to find a cure for the disease. Over time, it began to be observed in various countries, including India, where the incidence of breast cancer is rising at an alarming rate among women in the age group of 30-50, according to the National Cancer Registry Programme.
Last October, Aditi Mittal, who will be 30 this year, decided to do something about it. She wrote a six-minute comedy set on bra shopping and breasts; making fun of women, their breasts, their underwear, the entire experience of shopping for brassieres, including the Rs. 3,000 ones from brands you cannot pronounce. The audience was never told that this comic skit was about breast cancer awareness right until the sixth minute. Then, the same audience that was laughing their guts out were smiling nervously, some even wondering whether to laugh or not.
As if understanding their predicament, Mittal went into another joke for the final 10 seconds. The audience laughed uproariously again.
“Humour is a defence mechanism,” she says, “because it allows us to overcome the sadness in our lives.” The breast cancer set, which had the audience in splits, is one such example. “For a long time, we have used laughter to survive. The biological function of humour is human survival, it is to establish an ‘in’ group.”
Mittal is one of India’s superstar stand-up comics. Her breast cancer awareness video alone has garnered 34 lakh views on YouTube so far, and she has close to 1.25 lakh YouTube subscribers, 2.64 lakh followers on Twitter, and more than 62,000 followers on Facebook.
But she gets the kicks from her neighbour recognising her. “So, one day, this woman meets me at the elevator and says, ‘Aditi, my daughter loves you so much. Will you come to our house for lunch? Veg or non-veg?’”
Awkward silences
Stand-up comedy, Mittal says, brings people closer to the performers, because distances are bridged by laughter. It’s not easy, though, earning this proximity. “You fail. You fail again. That one minute of awkward silence when the audience is not laughing at your punchline—it can be the most excruciating.”
Stand-up comedy in India, once a domain of mimics and narrators of funny jokes, is now about being politically aware, about exposing hypocrisies, about observational comedy. “The process for stand-up is that you practise so much that it should look like you make no effort on stage at all,” says Mittal, who’s been performing professionally for more than five years. “It should look like you just walked on to the stage and you have all these endless funny things to say. It should sound like it’s my stream of consciousness.”
To hone her craft, Mittal wakes up early and switches off the Internet connection to negate all distractions, and then writes for more than an hour at a stretch. The ideas keep flowing, and she ends up writing seven or eight pages of material before she brings out the editing knife. “Then it’s just edit, edit, edit. Cut the flab. Use the minimum number of words to get to the punchline.”
In the process, Mittal says, every word, every gulp of the throat is bland in order for it to seem organic in the final presentation. “It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it?” Sixty per cent of her work is editing. It works, because you don’t listen to a soporific 20-minute monologue, but a quick five-minute hilarious set. Comedy can also be deeply personal, where you examine your place in the power structure. Patrons of stand-up comic routines or even those that laugh at private jokes at a family gathering are projecting their thoughts to highlight other people who may be in a condition similar to you. “But you are unable to do much about that power structure,” Mittal confesses, “because when it comes to political awareness, in many cases, the person is the politics of all that he or she represents.”
Take Indian weddings. Mittal says even in a seemingly social function where a bond is being enshrined in the institution of marriage, there is the politics of keeping up with the Joneses, or being noticed for being extravagant. “Anything that is deeply personal is also deeply political.”
She speaks about how Johnny Lever, one of India’s pioneering stand-up comics and a leading comic actor in Hindi films, recently did a set on his struggle to quit drinking. “There were about 600 people sitting in the theatre, and there he is, openly talking about one of the most deeply tragic things that has happened to him, and making a joke out of it. How many people in the audience would be able to identify with his struggles? For him, drinking was reality, and so was being able to get rid of it. He struggled with his own political shortcomings.”
As English historian and politician Horace Walpole said, “The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”
In casual conversation, without reference to Walpole, Mittal, a graduate in theatre and mass communication from Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, says that being politically aware is about knowing where your power lies as a citizen of the State. “We don’t have any say over what is happening around us, but stand-up comedy, for a few moments, creates an illusion of having been able to say something or do something when s**t is flying all around you. This is what keeps us going, this mirage of achievement. And when you are funny, people listen.”
In a small way, stand-up comedy has become a small form of protest, just as newspaper cartoons have been for decades. “It is a statement of protest from someone that has no power, but she is laughing or creating a comic sketch about it so that she can survive or even comprehend the situation.”
Holding a mirror
The function of stand-up comedy in this generation, and perhaps in the future too, is to hold a mirror to power and to society without being harsh about it. Mittal says this is not easy. When the political environment around you is not what you would like it to be, she says, “You seek the funny as a source of comfort. You seek the absurd, the incongruity of it all, the lighter element to find a way for yourself, to process it better.”
Self-censorship is becoming a serious issue in stand-up comedy, Mittal feels. There are three layers when it comes to giving a performance that might be construed as politically incendiary. “One, I might think that this is not what I should be heard saying because, you know, my parents or my family might feel bad about it. The second is when I decide to say something that is unpopular and counters the political wisdom of the day. If I say something that is not popular, should I then continue with it and risk losing that audience forever?”
The third layer is perhaps the most significant. It is about the environment that may have created the first two considerations. “If I say it, I will be trolled, but then I think to myself, ‘Guess what, Mittal, you have already been trolled for it. Is there a thing like double jeopardy in trolling?’”
Therefore, she says, she is not looking to go out on the streets and shout slogans, or stand in front of Parliament House in protest. “I just want to have the freedom to make fun. It’s simple, isn’t it? The freedom to make fun?”
It is almost as if this demand for a simple freedom is in desperation. It is not just about the political environment, although one may argue that everything in life is politics. There is the religious fanatic or bigot who gets offended by what you say. There is the caste warrior who does not like being made fun of. There is the political stalwart who pretends to defend the thoughts of his constituents when all he is doing is create a framework for electability to power.
“That is why context is important,” says Mittal. “All comedy has to be contextualised. We don’t do this, and that’s why we have an army of offended people. But the only way to face anything for saying something is to say it. So, I am like, let’s do it, and we will see what happens. I hope. You see, comedy is also the study of hope.”
Though she has become a public figure due to her television appearances and her YouTube stardom, Mittal says stand-up comics are not the cool kids. “We are the kids standing at the back looking at the cool kids.”
- One of the first women stand-up comics in India; rated among India’s top 10
- Featured in American documentary
- Member of the Vir Das improv group The Cardinal Bengans
- A fan of Tina Fey and Kirsten Wiig
She warns comedians against placing themselves at the centre of the narrative. “You have to be the conduit, the vehicle to deliver a message; you cannot and should not become the message yourself. Or the story. You process the world, but you are not the world. You are the vehicle, you are not the road. Even if your cat died, you still have to go backstage, drink a can of Coke, roll up your sleeves and recount your jokes to make people laugh.”
It kind of makes Mittal sound like a philosopher. She may say she isn’t, but most comedians are. Somewhere, in the deep trenches of their comic sets, are secrets to life and living. The trick is to decipher them.
sachin.kalbag@thehindu.co.in
Published - March 25, 2017 04:25 pm IST