Queens Of Comedy

Four of the country’s most popular comediennes — Sumukhi Suresh, Urooj Ashfaq, Kaneez Surka and Neeti Palta — discuss what it means to be a woman in the comedy circuit today, the pros and cons of the cancel culture and the #MeTooIndia movement that roared through the country last year.

- Mayukh Majumdar

“All right, so before I start, we’ll play a quick quiz. What are female comics called?” I open my interview with Sumukhi Suresh, Urooj Ashfaq, Kaneez Surka and Neeti Palta. The responses were varied and are listed below. “Funny!” “A rarity.” “I am a comedian, the way you spell it for men.” “Who wrote the Oxford, yaar?” When I tell them that the correct word is comedienne, I am greeted with a collective “hatt!”

The atmosphere in the room is pretty chill — of course, the four women I’ve come to interview know each other. I ask the women if comedy has a gender, and while three of them let out a strong NO!, Surka has the best answer – “it’s female because it makes you feel good,” she says. Of course, we all applaud and wolf whistle.

The reason I began my interview with these two questions is because, through the course of my research, I had noted a trend — journalists kept treating these women as a separate breed, as if comedy was a playground for men and these ladies had started practising their own gilli-danda on the side. Then, of course, there are these sexist notions we are surrounded by which tell us that women can’t drive and that women aren’t funny.

Palta and Surka, in particular, I noticed, had jokes dedicated to how female comics were considered an alien species.

“Music doesn’t have a gender, painting doesn’t have a gender, writing doesn’t have a gender,” Ashfaq chimes in. Palta states that there are certain routines dedicated to experiences these comics encounter, like, “getting your ass pinched”. That, understandably, becomes ‘chick comedy’, she states. But, even when she is talking about an experience as normal as being treated by a doctor, it still gets branded a chick comedy simply because she is a woman.