A rising comic force in standup and TV
Aparna Nancherla follows up star turn on sitcom Corporate with politically charged comedy
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 standup delivery is often dry with lethally funny flashes of absurdity, the 36-year-old Nancherla is a formidable figure in discerning comedy circles.
She has been seen recently on Netflix’s Master of None as well as being heard on the podcasts 2 Dope Queens and Blue Woman Group, which she co-hosted with fellow comic Jacqueline Novak.
This year, besides appearing in the second season of HBO’s Crashing, Nancherla began her biggest role yet with Comedy Central’s Corporate (airing on Much in Canada Wednesdays at 10 p.m.), 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 soulcrushing megacorporation.
“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.” Did you have any office jobs like in Corporate?
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 NBC-Universal for a while. One of your episodes of Blue Woman Group was about managing depression in an office.
I think we both have had office jobs and realized how bad the combination of having a brain that skews depressive or anxious in those environments, because it feels like they’re set up to trigger a lot of things that your brain likes to go toward. I think they’re incubators for those tendencies. You’re very honest about depression and anxiety in your comedy. Did that evolve while you were performing?
I think I had been struggling with a particularly bad rut of depression and anxiety and was having trouble really creating anything. So I kind of started writing about it by virtue of the fact that I wasn’t able to write about anything else. I think I just tried it onstage because I was like, this was all I’ve written recently, and I think it struck a chord with people in a way that I wasn’t expecting. Your comedy album Just Putting It Out There from 2016 didn’t touch on much political material. Are you doing more of that now?
It’s interesting because my first jobs in TV, my first one was Totally Biased (With W. Kamau Bell) on FX, and that was definitely more politically minded and social justice-oriented. Then the next late night show I worked on was Seth Meyers’, which was also more politically minded.
I feel like my jobs have always been more politically inclined and then my standup caught up to that later by virtue of the climate that we’re in now.
But I still try to speak to it from the same place of, how does this show up in my day-to-day life? I have a joke, “I’m really bad at calling my representatives because I’m an introvert and I don’t like talking to strangers on the phone.” Do you feel an additional obligation to be outspoken as a woman of colour and a child of immigrants?
Yeah, I think in that sense I’m more politically outspoken on social media about certain issues that I feel strongly about. But I still haven’t quite figured out how to bring some of that into my standup. Because then the trick is making it funny and not just making people angry or bummed out about it. It’s trying to find that angle to approach it.