Meet rising force in Comedy Central’s Corporate
Seated in a brightly lit Hollywood coffee shop, Aparna Nancherla doesn’t have the usual bearing of a comedy scene-stealer. Cheerful and direct where her stand-up delivery is often dry with lethally funny flashes of absurdity while examining her issues with depression and anxiety, the 36-year-old Nancherla is a formidable figure in discerning comedy circles.
The daughter of Indian immigrants who was raised in Washington, D.C., but now lives in New York, Nancherla has a well-earned reputation as one of the funniest voices on Twitter. She has recently been seen on Netflix’s Master of None as well as being heard on the podcasts 2 Dope Queens and a show that offered a comic spin on living with depression, Blue Woman Group, which she co-hosted with fellow comic Jacqueline Novak.
This year, in addition to appearing in the second season of HBO’s Crashing (and one of the network’s upcoming 2 Dope Queens specials), Nancherla began her biggest role yet with Comedy Central’s Corporate, which was created by two of her friends from the L.A. comedy scene, Matt Ingebretson and Jake Weisman. In it, she portrays Grace, the jaded head of HR at a soul-crushing mega-corporation. In one episode, she delivers an existential PowerPoint presentation on how her fellow employees “deal with the pain of being alive” (it’s far funnier than it sounds).
“I think a lot of lines on this show are things that you think but wouldn’t say, but everyone is just saying them,” she said with a laugh. “I guess this is a world where everyone just says the undertone of what they meant.”
Back in L.A., where she once lived and still occasionally performs, Nancherla talks more about Corporate and navigating comedy and reality in the age of Trump.
Q: Did you have any office jobs like in Corporate?
A: The day job I had the longest was I worked at like a trade magazine in D.C. It was weird, it was kind of a meta-job because it was this magazine that studied how companies train their employees to be more productive and engaged. So it was kind of about work, it was a magazine about workplaces. Then when I moved out here I temped at NBCUniversal for a while.
Q: Was there a different sort of corporate culture you noticed at these jobs?
A: I think NBC was probably the biggest corporation I worked for in an office-worker capacity. You get emails that are like, “This is our new policy on this,” and you’re like, “Who makes this decision? Where does it come from?” Then there would be events like we’d all go and celebrate something that was apparently big about the company that day — it just felt like everything filtered down. I feel like the show does a good job capturing how surreal and otherworldly it can be.
Q: Were you able to draw from the places you worked for this show?
A: I’ve always struggled in an office atmosphere, I get very antsy and restless. And I think I also have trouble buying into the culture of it because there is something taken away from everyone’s humanity, I think, but you’re supposed to buy into that and not maybe acknowledge the degree to which that’s happening? I think I had a lot of trouble with that contradiction.
Q: Your character on the show works in human resources, which is its own heightened reality.
A: I know, HR is supposed to be for your employees’ interests, but I feel like a lot of times it comes across as sinister because someone’s like: “HR wants to see you.” And you’re always like: “Oh, I’m losing my job.”