COMEDY TO AFFECT A SOCIETAL CHANGE
THOUGH A NEWBIE IN THE COMEDY SCENE, AAYUSHI JAGAD HAS MADE PEOPLE SIT UP AND TAKE NOTICE
Aayushi Jagad, who used to work for All India Bakchod (AIB), and Sumedh, who featured in one of their sketches, released a video recently where they broke down just how AIB “uses” feminism and even questioned whether its content was token feminist for the most part.
While AIB has created women-centric or specifically feminist sketches like the Bollywood Diva Song featuring Kangana Ranaut or It’s Your Fault featuring Kalki Koechlin, the duo pointed out that in most of their other videos, the roles women are assigned mirror the kind of roles women are given in other popular media, often stereotypical or dispensable.
Aayushi doesn’t try to be political or dark in any way. She uses anecdotes from her life to connect with the members of the audience. “That way I don’t have to generalise and still get to talk about things that are important to me, yet not in a way that might hurt sentiments. Most of my material is silly and deeply rooted in personal experiences. I’m a very new comic and so I learn as I go.”
Comedy at its very core is about empathy, feels Aayushi, one of the contestants on TLC’s Queens of Comedy — India’s first all-women comedy show. Aayushi has been challenging stereotypes and is absolutely unapologetic about everything — from the way she appears, to her sense of humour and the punches in her jokes. “It’s a way of talking about difficult situations and working through feelings of sadness, conflict or awkwardness. Comics can be the voice of a generation, breaking down topics like politics, religion or sexuality, that would otherwise be difficult to do. I think they choose these topics to make sense of the world around them and to expose such issues. We choose weighty topics to offer our opinions on the matter so that the audience can see it in a new light and possibly change their perspective on one of the subjects. It’s not easy, especially in the current climate, to joke about politics freely. Our country tends to misunderstand our Constitutional right of freedom of speech. If that should escalate, it may make it harder for comics in the future to tell their stories,” she says.
The job of a comedian is to strike a balance between driving a seemingly heavy point and still managing to make it funny. “It would be difficult to assess how efficiently comedy impacts people’s opinions. There is so much noise and nonsense online, but most of it is just words. This is definitely an uphill battle. Comedy absolutely has the tools to bring about change if only we, as the audience, let it,” she explains.
Stand-up can be and often times is, a path to social change, she agrees. “We’ve seen it one too many times that stand-up generates a negative reaction from people — like the AIB Roast or more recently the backlash from Rahul Subramanium’s video about DJs. But a reaction of that magnitude, in my opinion, means one big thing. They are listening. It means that comedy in this country does have the power to reach people. As is the nature of social media, outrage will continue no matter what a comic says. In the meantime, we’ll just keep saying positive things about everything from equality to policy and little by little hope to make a difference,” she says, signing off on a hopeful note.
I just write about the things I experience around me. This way, even if I’m talking about feminism or socioeconomic status, it’s always accompanied by an anecdotal story and is more personal