In ‘Corporate,’ Nancherla taps office anxieties
Seated at a booth in a 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 35-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 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 sort of comic spin on living with depression, “Blue Woman Group,” which she co-hosted with fellow comic Jacqueline Novak.
This year, in addition to continuing to appear 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.” In it, she portrays Grace, the jaded head of HR at a soulcrushing 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 LA, where she once lived and still occasionally performs, Nancherla talks more about “Corporate” and navigating comedy and reality in the age of Trump. The following is an edited transcript.
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.
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.
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.”
A: I think (Jacqueline Novak and myself ) both have had office jobs and realized how bad the combination of having a brain that skews depressive or anxious (is with) those environments, because it feels like they’re set up to trigger a lot of things that your brain likes to go toward. 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. my first one was “Totally Biased (With W. Kamau Bell)” on FX, and that was definitely more politically minded and social justiceoriented. 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 stand-up 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 where it’s like, “I’m really bad at calling my representatives because I’m an introvert and I don’t like talking to strangers on the phone.”
A: Yeah, I think in that sense I’m more politically outspoken on social media about certain issues that I feel strongly about. But to me 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.