There is a theory that humour is a tool that nature equipped men with, to help them court women. And then, evolution ensured that men became really good at cracking jokes, and women at laughing at them. Probably that is what gave rise to the misconception that women cannot do stand-up. Four women comics – Kaneez Surka, Supriya Joshi, Niveditha Prakasam and Prashasti Singh – in the new Netflix original series Ladies Up, are out to prove the theory wrong.
And they do it, too. These women really are funny. In varying degrees, though. Each comic has a distinct style and method of delivery. Surka’s material, for example, is personal in a rather generic way. She jokes about the freedom of getting divorced and being tagged a ‘lost case’. And about wanting to be a mom so badly that she does not ‘friend-zone’ her dates, she ‘mom-zones’ them. She does, occasionally, resort to tired tropes. Like the overdone-to-death joke of finding cows roaming on Indian roads. Or how, when the situation demands it, she resorts to using the ‘woman card’. (Don’t we all?)
If Surka exhausts the woman card, Prakasam goes a little overboard with the racism card. As a dark-skinned Tamil woman, she takes quite a few digs at her kind. South Indians don’t hate north Indians, she jokes. What they hate more are fair south Indians. The most talented of the four is probably Singh. She nailed the whole small-town-girl-in-big-city act. Her jokes about dating in your 30s were spot-on, like her mother asking her to give ‘Timber’ a try, but only if she could find a good Kshatriya boy on it.
My favourite comic, however, was Joshi. Her style is mostly self-deprecating. She makes fun of herself a lot, like how she joined a gym after a painful breakup to get a ‘revenge bod’. But it is also very self-revelatory. She is not afraid of showing herself at her most vulnerable. She talks, for example, of attempting suicide once. But she could not just go without leaving a note for her 27,000 Instagram followers. As she wrote it, she found that she was enjoying the process tremendously. “I was writing poetry on that page,” she says. She was even forgiving people who had done nothing to her. “I forgive you for Joker, Akshay Kumar,” she jokes, “even though it was a terrible movie.” There was a brutal honesty about her material. Yes, it was funny. But it was the kind of layered humour that, after making you laugh, remained with you because it adhered closely to reality. Truth, after all, is often funnier than fiction.
Ladies Up
Available on Netflix
Rating: 3/5