Bagga’s got it in the bag!
Aishwarya Shrivastav
All week, KrantiKali has been speaking to some of the most talented and quick-witted women to get centerstage at TLC’s Queens Of Comedy.
Runner up on Queens Of Comedy, Surbhi Bagga took the one of a kind comedy platform for women and made it to the top three!
We got to talking with the Delhi girl about her comic origin story, constantly uses the word ‘Jeopardy’ incorrectly; but in her defence, it does sound a lot like how you would describe a really fun party in Punjabi.
When she started stand up comedy, she was the only women in the line up most of the time. She thinks the number of successful female comedians is relatively low because most of them don’t take it seriously and they do fall off track easily.The constant fear of judgement also works against their favour. Receptiveness of audience and courage for women to assume the stage is what is needed and it’s a process which has to be reciprocating.
“ You need people to talk about something? Take up the charge and speak about it.It’s simple as that.” she says, “I don’t really believe the notion that ‘Men don’t like funny women’. Maybe they haven’t been hearing good women comics and we can change that.”
Talking of her jokes, she likes to give her personal insecurities a comic angle. Self deprecating humour is what dominates her comic ideas complemented with real life experiences which makes it personal and help her get comfortable in her own self.
On being a female comedian she believes it’s like being a woman anywhere in industry. You have to be twice funnier when you crack a joke as compared to a male comedian. She tries to dress casual because if women are dressed relatively better, as she observed, people won’t take the joke seriously. She often felt the need to lower down her looks in order to shift the attention from her body to her jokes.
There is difference in approaches of audience when there is a female comedian out here as compared to a male comedian. Inappropriate sexual humour doesn’t make an audience as uncomfortable when a man does it as much as it does when a woman comedian does the same. Surbhi believes that to make audience comfortable, you got to crack more of those jokes. “Push their buttons”, she told KrantiKali. “Until you talk about things which they are not used to, you can’t blame them for watching shows like Kapil Sharma and others serving blatant sexism among other things. If you give people alternatives, they surely will watch it. Women need to come out and claim more spaces.” Bagga is a KrantiKali in her own way mirroring our thoughts with, “Not just comedy but generally women need to speak out more so that people are forced to listen. If we are still waiting for someone who will politely pass off the mic, it’s not going to happen. Shying away from writing bold content fearing judgement is restricting your own voice without any logical reasons to do so.”
She is hopeful about the emerging comedy scene in India and great set of women comedians making people go crazy with edgy jokes and creative ranting. She thinks change is a gradual process and audience would be more accommodating in some years down the lane. Till then we need to constantly challenge the stage and ourselves too for writing and speaking what we believe in so that we could be the change we want to see out there.
You can follow her here!
About our writer: Aishwarya Shrivastav is a history graduate from University of Delhi. A spoken word poet, she likes to describe herself as a woman taking up more space than she was allotted by the society. Raging through words.
