Soho theatre, LondonThe Indian standup’s Unalive show is stronger for its satire on her native country’s super-rich than its mild, middling musings on coronavirus A show of two halves, this one, from Indian standup Aditi Mittal, who rakes over Covid co…
Continue ReadingIn 2012, he gurned his way around Mumbai on a tiny bike, baffling everyone except the Indian elite, who adore a posh, bumbling Brit. Could this new visit see the PM being compared to Beyoncé?If you Google Boris Johnson while online in India, a brillian…
Continue ReadingComedian Vir Das is getting some backlash in India for a joke he made at the Kennedy Center in Washington… MORE
Vir Das is facing backlash for monologue about coming from “two Indias” appeared first on The Laugh Button.
The comedian and her dad recreate a childhood photo and talk about early days in India, agoraphobia and swapping banking for comedy Born in New Delhi in 1969, Sindhu Vee spent her childhood in India and the Philippines, before throwing herself into aca…
Continue ReadingSoho theatre, LondonFrom being spat at by male audience members to mum riding ‘groin first’ to the rescue, Mittal delivers an irreverent setWhen Aditi Mittal made her UK debut two years ago, it was with a lightweight guide to India for outsiders. You g…
Continue ReadingThe Stay Awake party, the polling station in an area populated by lions … on the eve of results in India, Anuvab Pal reveals how the biggest election in history – with 900 million voters – is comedy goldI sit down to read the Indian Express and come ac…
Continue ReadingWith his persona of a Raj-revering Indian, Anuvab Pal dons a Beefeater jacket and judge’s wig to trace colonial legacy in the standup show The Empire
Reckoning with colonialism is on the minds of third-generation diaspora kids. Projects such as the Crimes of Britain website are monitoring Britain’s imperial legacy for today’s youth and interrogating Britain’s claim to greatness. Now, the Indian standup Anuvab Pal anatomises the same subject matter in his touring comedy show, The Empire, which he performs at Soho theatre in London this week.
A Bengali native, Pal offers an Indian perspective on the armies who turned up uninvited on India’s shores. But he also uses his routines to inform audiences of a subset of Indians who yearn for the return of the Raj.
Related: India’s new wave of comedians laugh in the face of taboos
Continue ReadingUnderbelly Med Quad, Edinburgh
The standup is strongest when she eviscerates cultural cliches in this nervy but promising fringe debut
Aditi Mittal’s recent Radio 4 show was called A Beginner’s Guide to India, and it also describes what Mittal serves up for her maiden Edinburgh fringe show, Global Village Idiot.
It can feel as if Mittal, one of India’s most successful English-language standups, is performing a set required to ingratiate herself to a UK audience, rather than one that might interest her more. I look forward to the show that defines her by something other than her nationality. In the meantime, this is a tasty appetiser from a comic showing flashes of sharpness and steel amid her off-the-peg gags about Bollywood and the Kama Sutra.
Continue ReadingHow’s your Hinglish? That’s not a rhetorical question. Because Aditi Mittal, the first Indian woman to get her own Netflix hour comedy special, freely mixes English and Hindi in Things They Wouldn’t Let Me Say. Most of her work translates easily. But as I wrote in my review on Decider: “I realized that being 30 […]
Continue ReadingAmazon cut a deal with 14 stand-up comedians from India for new specials to expand its global reach with Prime Video. But Netflix has perhaps the biggest comedy star from India already in Vir Das, who just released his first special for the streaming platform, Abroad Understanding. He shot the hour in two locales: A […]
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