Women’s Day 2022: Female stand-up comedians are now a critical mass in entertainment

South Mumbai’s “other”,  Dongri is a Muslim ghetto in common perception and it continues to be imagined and interpreted by film-makers and writers. It is home to famous gangsters, its self-proclaimed protectors. Shaikh humanises Dongri as well as ridicules it, and lends it the mundaneness that’s lost on most Mumbaikars and tourists. She is a nimble provocateur.

Shaikh and Joshi, like many other 20-plus women comics carry forward the comedy stand-up act of female experience, that started in a big way in the first decade of the 2000s with artistes like Vasu Primlani, Neeti Palta and Aditi Mittal, with much more fire and spit. In 2013, I met several of them at newly-opened comedy clubs in the metros for a cover story while I was a writer at Mint Lounge. Mittal had told me about her gig at a Rotary Club women’s gathering in 2013. Do you ever get that deep-throated laughter, you know, the peals, I’d asked her. “Yes, usually in jokes that do not involve anything about women,” she’d replied. She had recently performed at a Rotary Club’s women’s gathering. The ladies went silent after Mittal mentioned the words ‘women’ and ‘masturbation’ in the same sentence. It was scary, she told me. All she could muster to defuse the dead silence was, “Ok ladies, masturbation exists.” A few of the ladies in pearls laughed.

In 2022, Indian women comics are philosophers and whistleblowers. They kvetch and holler about masturbation, sex, infanticide, Muslim-ness, economic disparity, and everything under their sun, moon and bedsheets. The numbers are growing: Sumukhi Suresh, Kusha Kapila, Keneez Surkha, Dolly Singh, Srishti Dixit, Niharika NM, Prajakta Koli, avatar Shetty, Urooj Ashfaq, Prashahti Singh are just some of the established names letting their guts out with moxie and verve.

And audiences have the appetite for it. OTT platforms are the new comedy clubs. Following the success of stand-up shows on Netflix USA, stand-up comedy is one of the most watched segments on OTT channels across the world. Ali Wong has three Netflix specials, Amy Schumer has two, and many others such as Sarah Silverman, Tiffany Haddish, Iliza Shlesinger and Katherine Ryan have their own solos. Prime Video has Jayde Adams and others. Ladies Up, a one-hour Indian women stand-up comics special is on Netflix.

This is a historic moment for women in stand-up comedy. After centuries of not being able to speak their minds and speak about the repressed gravel of their experiences—which includes discrimination, bullying, assault and silence—openly and loudly, women stand-up comics are now a critical mass in entertainment, opening up their salty, bruised selves to audiences worldwide.

Ali Wong recorded two shows for Netflix with her heavily pregnant belly. Amy Schumer followed suit. In the recently released fourth season of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, a boffo hit of Amazon Prime, the lead, Midge, continues to struggle to get a spot in nightclubs. In one of the episodes of the new season, Midge picks up a drunk and passed-out Lenny Bruce, the most controversial and whacky practitioner of the artform of that time in America, from a pavement and gives him a bed to sleep at her home, which she shares with her parents and children after divorcing her husband. Lenny is outraged and ungrateful in the morning and storms out, saying it is not for stand-up comics to be nestled in domestic comfort. Nocturnal debauchery and discomfort are the inspiration, Lenny says. Most stand-up comic girls today would agree with Lenny. The tone of the Emmys-sweeping Maisel is a little different in the new show. The struggle of Midge to get a spot anywhere in Manhattan is magnified. Like the earlier seasons, the art direction is luscious, there is a profusion of pink and the kitten heels are still her choice of footwear. When Rachel Brosnahan, who plays Midge, gets a few minutes on the stage, her shtick is to dress up as if for a date, in cute dresses and pearls, and then free-associate truths about being a woman.

Cut to the pandemic years. Amy Schumer lifts her dress up to show a taped-up pregnant navel because it had become “so gross” as to make it a comic spectacle. In her Amazon Prime solo, Sumaira Shaikh wears a dusty pink chiffon chicken kurta over tight denims pants over black boots. A black leather jacket accents the soft kurta. In India, stand-up comics have moved far beyond beyond the recycled Gujarati-versus-Punjabi classics or in the words of best-selling author Anuja Chauhan, “the cheap, double-meaningwalla jokes”, the appetite for which is still formidable, as most successful Bollywood or South Indian pulp comedies show, but is boring for any stand-up comedy audiences in the Indian metros and two-tier cities. Stand-up, the most unfiltered of art forms, ought to be controversial and uneasy, and women artistes of the stand-up stage are ramping up the uneasy hilarity.

When, in the brilliant American documentary Hysterical (2021), about women stand-up comic artistes by Andrea Nevins, one of the featured women says, “It’s really disturbing when a man is half your size and tries to rape you”, the laughter is uneasy but it serves the purpose of talking about rape and assault as regular life experiences. In the same film, there is a clip of a 27-year-old comic Kelly Bachman who enters a venue for her act and sees the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein sitting among the audience. She decides to call Weinstein out, then in the middle of his trial for sexually assaulting 80 women. “I’m a comic,” Bachman says. “It’s our job to name the elephant in the room. Do we know what that is?” A few people nod and mutter in affirmation. Most of the crowd, a hodgepodge of 20- and 30-something performers at a basement bar in Manhattan, was dead silent.

“It’s a Freddy Krueger in the room, if you will,” she said. “I didn’t know we had to bring our own mace and rape whistles.” At that point, a handful of people in the back of the room started booing her. One yelled, “Shut up!”

She then goes into her set as planned, recounting an episode of irritable bowel syndrome and a childhood bully who compared her to a character from Shark Tales. During a bit about getting rejected at a sex party, Bachman looks directly at Weinstein and says, “Consent is important.”

Stand-up comedy is an aggressive, pre-emptive art. The stand-up artiste is looking for the candid, big laugh and among all the ingredients of comedy, what’s unavoidable for her is derision. She attacks everything that surrounds her audience’s life. Men are made for it, you’d think. As late author, columnist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens mansplained more than a decade ago in an uncharacteristically dumb column in Vanity Fair,  ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’, how can a man afford not to be funny? Humour is an index of desirability in men. But how many men have you encountered who consider “funny” a desirable quality in women, he asked.

Stand-up comedy now is much more than just about unlocking peals of laughter in audiences. It is about smashing patriarchy, and smashing all that solidifies social structures. And women are much more equipped to do that than men—it’s high time, because they have mountains to smash. Let’s face it, freedom of expression takes on a much more authentic grain when women get to exercise it. Women stand-up acts, for the first time in the history of comedy, are weaponising centuries of trauma and offering it on a platter, to laugh at it while forcing us to confront its magnitude.

For humour to be effective, it has to have the right amount of pressure or suffering—not so much that it lacerates, but not so little that it hardly makes a dent. Many women suffer in marriages and relationships, in their daily chores, in the many number of roles they are expected to live up to. (Ali Wong, in one of her Netflix specials, describes in hilarious detail, how the inability to find potty time in the mornings because of her wife and mother duties led her to a colonoscopy which found a huge mass of stool up her colon. Toilet humour is de rigueur among the new girls.) Some women can laugh it off, but if the suffering is constant and unending, or monotonous, the music in them dies. Humour is not just the ability to laugh at or make fun of a personally trying situation, it’s the ability to transcend a situation and see it for what it is. The millennial and post-millennial women stand-up comics who are flying solo on Netflix and Amazon are those women—and hence that critical mass in entertainment today.

Even Batman, in the new Batman movie, justifies, in his singularly dour way, how suffering, when transformed and articulated, becomes something that the collective can benefit from. Iliza Schlesinger says it differently in Hysterical: “I’m offering myself up in an effort to find myself, hoping in doing so, you will also find yourself.”

Unlike Batman, Iliza can make you shit your shorts laughing.