Punny woman- Pavitra Shetty
Aishwarya Shrivastav
“Women can be really funny’’
Two years ago at an all ladies open comedy mic, with lot of encouragement, forceful persuasion by friends and impulsive bravery, Pavitra Shetty’s comic tryst began; an engineer by profession and a comedian by art.
She prepared the set and made one of her friends listen to it who was bit too critical but honest and asked her to work on an entire new set. So she changed the set two-three days before the performance. It went off really well. Aditi Mittal encouraged her and gave her useful advice on how to improve it.
Juggling between her IT job and a passion for comedy, Pavitra began attending more open mics but just ladies only, ones that used to happen once a month. She started getting more spots on the open mic and she gradually extended her time on stage.
Talking about few female comedians, she has a view that women began to access public spheres much later as compared to men. So it’s more a matter of lack of opportunities and not of lack of equal capabilities.Now if we see the influx, many women are doing amazing things in comedy on stage and off stage too. Internet has provided people with so many options to do podcast and upload videos and not everyone needs to climb onto a stage to deliver what they want to speak which has also increased the scope of reaching out to a larger group of audience.
Jokes are more offensive when a woman says it and that has been the prevalent norm. She likes a lot of women comedians who are grabbing attention by story telling, it’s nice to hear the woman’s side of the story and most importantly by women themselves.
While preparing her set, she focuses more on personal experiences which she feels are relatable but also unique because everyone has a lot of different stories to tell. At the end of the set, her goal is to leave audience with a part of her so they feel that they know her. These jokes never die. Jokes about personal experiences stay longer with audience and create a personal bond too.
She points out that she feels lucky to have supportive friends and family who do not impose unnecessary restrictions on her just because she s a woman. Also she mentioned the supportive comic fraternity who haven’t let the gender question come in the way. At the same time she is not ignorant about the gender bias. She understands it is there but as for herself she just happened to meet the right people at the right time which sort of helped her focus more on improving on her set and not worry about the societal expectations.
There have been times when people get to know there is a woman comedian up next on stage and they are almost in awe with the expression,“we didn’t know women can be funny too” . Sometimes when they talk about bold topics or the mention of cuss words by a woman, some people are amused and some are shocked as well and it has nothing to do with the joke or the cuss word but the plain fact that a woman uttered it. She recalls a weird incident when after a performance, a group of audience literally walked up to her just to say, “You abuse so well for a girl”. But she knows their heart was in the right place when they said it so she didn’t really give it a lot of thought. They also talked about how they were unsure of a woman performing humour and watch her perform so well, totally changed their minds. The thing that really made her happy was that she was able to break common stereotypes like, “women can’t be funny”. Opinions are changing and people are ready to hear. They are willing to hear but the question is- Are we ready to speak?
We are not there yet but we are advancing at a good pace. We now have more open mics, feature shows and more spots for women. We have surely come a long way.
Talking of current projects, she is working with Abish Mathew as a part time writer for ‘Son Of Abish’ and it is her first attempt in writing but she is looking forward to it.
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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.
