What It Takes To Be A Woman In Stand-Up Comedy: Anu Vaidyanathan

I am an engineer who loves engineering. I still do. When I take a break from my more creative pursuits, I find myself poring over my old Signals & Systems lecture notes. I realise in writing this that I am the stereotype I break down in my comedy.

What It Takes To Be A Woman In Stand-Up Comedy

The nerdy engineer, with no personality, fumbling with her words when it came to matters of the heart, a major change of orientation or just dropping old friendships when posits feminism on social media and practices a healthy apathy with common courtesy towards another working woman. I’ve been thinking about why I got into standup comedy in the first place. While I’d like to think it is the incarceration of the pandemic, which made filmmaking impossible and writing beyond two years unbearable, I know it started a lot earlier than that.

Motherhood both grounded me and let me soar. It became obvious very early on that my newborns could not care less about engineering or incarceration, professionally or pandemically. The love language of very young children happens to be an appreciation of music, colour, story and to my great satisfaction, movement. Working from home put our own grown-up shackles in such great focus that it became ungainly not to joke about it. And making a fool of myself comes easiest to me so, standup seemed a natural fit. What I did not know when I started was the amount of material I could draw from.

As Engineers, we were always made to feel secure if we worked hard enough. That was the party line anyway. What did not add up were the boob-gazing professors who made me quit my first attempt at a PhD. As Engineers, we believed in big English words like egalitarian. What did not add up were the gatekeepers of the arts, all co-located in New Delhi when I tried to write a book.

As Engineers, we believed competence was a verb far more worthy than struggle. What did not add up was the digestive tracts of second-second assistant directors, second assistant directors, first assistant directors and whatever else one had to struggle through being before ending up in a pile of shit. Or aspiring to be a director. And some permutation and combination of egos dressed up like matryoshka dolls in the great abyss of the Indian film industry, headquartered in Mumbai.

I was quite confused after I made my first film. I was on film sets where mansplaining was the norm, struggle trumped competence and feminism was occasionally a thin veil to shroud what we are all struggling with, a greater and greater sense of isolation.

Early on in my standup life, I thought to myself, I have better things to make fun of than my own body. But a woman’s body is as imperfect as it gets. And I take great satisfaction in those imperfections because it makes room for pouring in more gold. Mothers are the poster children of karmic kintsugi, break me down, build me up, times infinity. As a professional athlete, there were no doubts about what constituted a healthy diet, restful sleep or good habits. As an engineer, there were many all-nighters when finishing up difficult projects where our sole sources of nutrition were packets of chips and fizzy drinks from vending machines. As an artist, I forget to eat for days on end taking the latest buzz phrase, intermittent fasting, beyond ninja levels and then eat enough fried chicken to put Brendan Fraser’s daemonic depiction of Charlie, in The Whale, to shame.

And then there is the Madonna-whore dichotomy. Which my comic brain fused into more. We just want to do more as women, mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives. We want to be more than the innermost matryoshka doll in the hierarchy of egos. How funny that the most powerful men are closeted momma’s boys and yet have trouble acknowledging their own wives in public. What would that dichotomy be termed for men? The moustache-or-lack-of-it penectomy? I am obsessed with moustaches. Especially the man who dares to cultivate one in tropical countries. It is not unlike the woman who wears her hair down, in April, in Chennai. I admire the commitment to appearance. I truthfully aspire to more of that in myself. The projection of inner peace despite a sweatier truth.

Female gaze or not, comedy is my unpaid therapy. To survive being a woman who knows her mind, or the lack of it as a human being on many occasions. Knows what she wants and will not apologise for it. After all, isn’t that what we tell little girls? Maybe it bears reminding us that we were those little girls once.

And all we must empower is ourselves. Without having to knock down the boys standing beside us. Or the girls. Or other human beings. Without having to subscribe to Webster’s definitions of historical movements. Without forgetting that charity begins at home. Once we are at home with ourselves, we are both grounded and ready to soar.

Anu Vaidyanathan is a Globally Renowned Multi-Talented Filmmaker, Author, Standup-Comedian, Triathlete, and Parent