Stand-up comic Prashasti Singh, 36, has a word to describe the culture of humour prevalent in Uttar Pradesh, the State she grew up in. “I call it ‘give-up humour’. It’s salty and bitter and so funny,” she says. “It is how people there cope with life. Bollywood discovered it around 15 years ago and they have not let it go.”
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Thank You For Coming, Singh’s first Hindi film as a writer released recently. Produced by Rhea Kapoor and Ekta Kapoor, it tells the story of a 32-year-old woman who has never had an orgasm. Most Indian women don’t orgasm because the majority of men don’t know how to have sex, the film submits. There was peak excitement when Rhea offered Singh the writing job after watching her riff on sex and singlehood. Her mother excitedly told everyone that Anil Kapoor’s daughter had called home.
“Most of us have been raised by a generation of parents who are not fully conservative, I call them confused liberals or semi-conservatives,” she says. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Work hard, party hard
Singh has already begun work on her next Hindi film. Her second, hour-long national comedy tour, Man of the House, is underway too. It’s inspired by the power struggles in our families and how they play out when the male figurehead is missing. “In the absence of patriarchy, there’s anarchy,” she says. Talking to her is almost as fun as watching her perform. She’s just woken up when we chat over the phone but our conversation is an hour of funny, insightful takes. “Most of us have been raised by a generation of parents who are not fully conservative, I call them confused liberals or semi-conservatives,” she says.
In her 20s, Singh was firmly on the path to middle-class nirvana. Her mother was a government college professor, her late dad a doctor, and Singh’s goal was to acquire engineering and MBA degrees and tick all the boxes that follow. “Drink coffee, work hard, get drunk with your friends,” as she puts it. She was happy if not a little burnt-out as she lived her perfectly-planned life, working at companies such as Deloitte Consulting, Dell and Star TV.
One of the things that strikes you when you watch her perform is how her body moves in perfect synchronicity with her jokes. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
But then she took improv classes to avoid going back to an empty home after work (salsa seemed too much of a cliche) and there they told her she was funny. In 2017, there were open mic opportunities for beginners in Mumbai and Singh began showing up after work. She had always loved the stage and she realised she could “distil the funny out of my theatrics”. One of the things that strikes you when you watch her perform is how her body moves in perfect synchronicity with her jokes.
Not the stable offspring
Later that year, she took a sabbatical from work when she got a chance to participate in Comicstaan, a popular reality TV show for budding stand-up comics on Amazon Prime. “It was like going on a vacation, having an affair and then coming back to your husband,” she says. Things were meant to go back to normal but they never did and after much thought, she quit her job to start a second life as a stand-up comic in 2018. She was no longer the stable offspring.
Soon she realised that life as an independent comic had an irregular heartbeat. The year-end months were great and business was solid in March, when everyone looked for a funny woman for Women’s Day. “I really milk people’s token feminism,” she says laughing. “Gimme all the tokens.” But in the summer months, the work dried up. There was writer’s block. “I understood why artists get depressed. When you’re new you say it all and then you wonder, ‘Did I have just one thing in me which I’ve given out?’.”
Then there’s was the price you pay for your life choices. “It gets very lonely living alone and with no office to go to. Switching careers makes you lose connections and with no structure to your day, you can start feeling very lost,” she says. It’s only recently, six years after embarking on this journey, that she’s made peace with the white noise of Internet feedback and started sharing her videos on YouTube.
She built a community of friends, many from her professional fraternity. Comics Kanan Gill and Biswa Kalyan Rath are mentors who pitch in for “professional and existential issues”. Urooj Ashfaq, who recently won the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, or the Oscars of comedy, is a close friend. “We discuss stuff and keep calibrating each other’s work,” says Singh.
As for U.P., Singh no longer goes back frequently. “The U.P. I grew up in was definitely not what it is now,” she says referencing the politics of hate. “The roads are better but people are worse.”
Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and the co-founder of India Love Project on Instagram.
