I tried to still put the butt of the joke on myself but there’s some stuff where I take some digs at him. My fiancé, I have some material about him now. Have you ever had anyone complain about you including them in your work? Because of my fear of disappointing other people, I try not to mine too much from other people’s lives. I know Maria Bamford’s sister had issues with her imitating her on stage. I remember doing an interview with two other comedians and we were all on the exact same timeline-started and then a pandemic and now the book comes out. and I was like an idiot, I was sitting there going, Why is this happening? And then I’m like, Oh, it was COVID. I think there’s like nine comedy memoirs. you guys are all releasing books at the same time. It feels a little disingenuous for my own act to fully pull something out of thin air and then be like, “And I thought that was so weird.” It is very much having lived an experience that is what incites me to want to write about it or capture that feeling of what it felt like in that moment. But I think the inciting incident, I try to keep true to because that’s where the whole idea of the joke came from. When I’m writing jokes, I do start with the facts, and then it might spin out and get more absurd from there or take a sillier direction. The way we remember things might be different than for someone else who was there. I think the way memory works, it can be kind of fickle. I was wondering how you gauge the lines you’re allowed to cross in comedy. The first person I thought of was Hasan Minhaj, who was recently caught in some of his own lies. In the introduction to your book, the part about the comedian Steve Rannazzisi lying about being in one of the towers during 9/11 really stuck out to me. In terms of the humor itself, I don’t know that they always get it but every so often my mom will just drop something in our family group texts and I’m like, OK, I see where I get it from. You were so shy and scared of everything. But with my mom it is very much, Oh my gosh, I’m so proud of you for getting up and talking in front of a bunch of people because I never could have imagined you pursuing this as a career when you were a kid. I think that’s a lot of where my humor formed, just like, Oh, sometimes everything is just kind of ridiculous.ĭo you feel like your parents understand your sense of humor? They don’t always understand the literal humor of my jokes. I think having access to that part of her made me really appreciate the goofiness of life, or how playful you can be just out of nothing, because it would come out of nowhere. When the silly side came out, it was kind of just a delight and like a little treat. But I will say my mom had a very silly side. My sense of humor developed in a bit of a vacuum in that I live very much in my head. I grew up pretty introverted, so I feel like maybe I wasn’t always in step with what was going on around me. It’s a nudge nudge, wink wink, kind of humor, I guess. I don’t know that a lot of people know about that. I have this feeling, just from my own family, the Pakistani side, that there is a huge amount of humor in the culture. Congratulations on the book! We’re very similar in lots of ways. No! I just did one of those Apple updates and I feel like everything doesn’t make sense again. Our rambling conversation is edited for clarity. I spoke to Aparna Nancherla on Zoom about everything from whether her Indian parents get her humor to whether she is ever really mean about anyone (only finance bros). But I guess that’s the message you could take from her book: That, in a sense, we’re all impostors in one way or another at various points in time to various people, including ourselves. That did not fit the idea of Nancherla I had. It was funny to see the private lightness behind the more public gloom. It is Amy Sedaris-style absurdity-nutso advice for women that no one should take-but then YouTube rolled into behind-the-scenes footage and I saw Nancherla break a bunch of times. Nancherla, who also does stand-up, might be better known for her voice work on BoJack Horseman (she plays Hollyhock) though.īefore I interviewed her about her memoir, which came out in September, I became a little addicted to watching episodes of Womanhood, her web series from 2016 with Jo Firestone. Kamau Bell in 2012 before going on to act in some major comedy series like Master of None, Crashing, and Corporate. She started out as a writer and performer on Totally Biased with W. Like, Oh dear, the world has gone to shit. The best I could come up with is it’s a sort of deadpan, self-effacing resignation. It fits that Aparna Nancherla’s first book, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome, would be about feeling like she doesn’t fit in because, to be frank, her comedy is kind of hard to describe.
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