Finding Her Comic ‘Koul-ing’ : with Anshita Koul
Aishwarya Shrivastav
“The job of an artist is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted’’
With subtlety not being her strong suit, she uses comedy to talk about Kashmiri culture and is the self proclaimed first Youtuber from Jammu and Kashmir to do so. Our next Queen is, Anshita Koul.
Describing her biography as someone who ‘wants to make up for all the years I was supposed to be entertaining’; After graduating as a Computer Science Engineer she worked in the IT industry for 5 years before hating it and switching to YouTube and Stand up Comedy. YouTube had just exploded in the Indian digital scene and she was glued to it. She knew that one day she was going to have her own YouTube channel, entertain everyone, make people laugh and sometimes make them think. Even while she worked another IT job for 4.5 years, she would still keep making vines, videos for friends etc. and take notes by watching other YouTubers and artists.
Cut to 2 years ago, when she moved to Germany, she had a choice to continue working in the IT industry or quit and set on a journey to establish herself as an artist; and she chose the latter of course. And it’s been a ride ever since!
Talking about why there are few female comedians she sums it up in one word answer — Patriarchy. It is always difficult to pursue something unconventional, irrespective of the gender. And as women, there are additional obstacles, challenges, and embuggerances. As women we need to fight harder to get the same things and it holds true in almost every industry.
Elaborating on her comedy style, she loves to derive humor from her real life experiences. She thinks it suits her the best. She has a lot of stories and some crazy experiences to share, all she need to learn and master is how to tell it in a stand-up format, which by the way is the most difficult thing to do in this genre. She wants to write satires and question certain ideologies through her content, making comedy both personal and social.
When asked how she fights the gender norms inflicted on her to live the life she is living right now, she exclaims ‘’OMG! I am 30 and married. So you can guess the question that I most frequently get asked these days. I get angry, disappointed and my first impulse is to shut them up, but as I am growing older I have learned to use satire and sarcasm without getting angry, to respond and not react. I want to lead by example so I want to focus most of my energy in my work, some of which already deals with the gender norms.’’ She made this video to come across and put forward her perspective better
Moreover, as she puts it, she has no f#$ks left to give to random and unreasonable expectations from random people, relatives, acquaintances, friends or followers. Her husband is a feminist, someone who is as open-minded as she is and gets very excited every time she breaks a stereotype. She has a bunch of friends who are pretty much on the same wavelength as she is. And when it comes to her families, she takes out time to have a conversation with them and not take them for granted. She makes them understand that there is a definite generation gap and their values are not same all the time. And they need to accept this and make peace with it. Sometimes they understand, sometimes they don’t but she believes that as long as there is a dialogue, it prevents chaos.
Talking about her on stage experience, she has performed and attended open mics where she did not find any sexism at all. There were good jokes that landed well and bad jokes that did not. And some jokes got applause, irrespective of the gender of the comic. However, she has also been to open mics where the audience was silent when a female comic said a cuss word or talked about sexuality because people did not expect that at all, or sometimes laugh out of shock. But they laughed out loud when the male comic did that.
She has been to open mics with 4 women and 20 men and most of the jokes or audience interaction, done by the host were sexist, racist and basically really bad and in one of those open mics, the host (male) kept saying ‘I am a feminist, I like girls!’
On the contrary, she has also been to open mics, where she saw the male host addressing the casual sexism in the jokes of few of the open mikers (male) and make sure they encourage new stand up comedians to write without any bias and a punching down attitude in general.
Talking about subjects that generally make people uncomfortable, she recalls one of her favorite quotes — “The job of an artist is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted.” You can either give a few seconds to the audience to react and chances are they will ( but mostly it ends in applause if it’s a good one)! Or if you are sure that the joke is really good and has worked well in the past, then you can address the discomfort caused by your joke in the audience with another joke or a spontaneous pun. It’s also something that you learn with practice. Improv really helps in this,she is also learning it. As far as Indian audience is concerned, subjects related to SEX, CUSS WORDS, and nowadays this media induced PSEUDO NATIONALISM etc makes the audience uneasy. And to top it all, if a woman is talking about these topics, it definitely, 100% makes people (both men and women in our country) uncomfortable.
She is hopeful about the women comedy scene today in India and feels that all kind of female points of view are necessary and really required, not just in comedy but in general as well. We have been either listening to men point of view or only a certain kind of women point of view that somehow adheres to patriarchy.
Excited about her current projects she worked on a short film in Germany which will be released very soon. She recently also organized and hosted Jammu’s first ever Standup Comedy Open mic- Jammu comedy Jam 1.0 which was a successful event. Apart from that, she has to get back to her YouTube channel soon and she is planning to do some different kind of content for her channel and also a series. Apart from that, she is going to write more standup material, hit more open mics in India and Germany and continue hustling.
You can follow her here!
Check out this amazing work of Koul
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.
