Hey everyone!  I'm so proud to co-produce our monthly comedy show at Blondies Bar in San Francisco at 8:30pm!  It's EVERY 4th MONDAY OF THE MONTH and it's a free show where we get to try out new material and just have fun!  #MoreFun at Blondies!  Support local comedy!  We have different comedians every month and remember...IT'S FREE!!

A few months ago, I had the honor of being interviewed by Women's Health Magazine to bring attention to the stigma of mental health illness amongst women.  This is a really personal article and I'm proud to share it with you all! Check it out here!



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This month I was able to travel to Mumbai, India and perform at Canvas Laugh Club - one of the few bonafide comedy clubs in India.   I was able to meet some other great local comics and talk to them about what its like being a comedian in India.  It was crazy to learn that many of them are able to be full time comics despite only being in the game for just a few years (between 3-6 years). One comedian I spoke with had already quit his full time job as a programmer to become a full time comedian and he had only been in comedy for a little under three years.  The demand for comics in India is that high and the supply is endemically low. 

Most comics from the United States have to work extremely hard for many many years in order to become full time comedians, or national headliners.  Not to mention that most require TV credits in addition to having strong fan bases, which takes years to build.  They say you don't really even 'find your voice' in the states until the 5 to 10 year mark.  But here in India, you can easily build up your time and start working full time as a comedian because there is a lot more stage time and stand up comedy is still a relatively new art form here in this country. 

Being a comic in the United States is not easy.  It takes years of struggle and you are treated like shit for many many years.  Now here I am speaking with comics from India who are treated much much better than the way comedians in the US are treated and in a fraction of the time and thinking about how fucking ironic the whole thing is.  My Indian-born parents immigrated from India in order to have a better life in America for themselves and their family. How odd now that one may need to move to India in order to have a better life as a comedian because life as a comic in America is so hard and shitty!!

Performed a set a few months back at a bar in Hayward that really got me thinking about a lot of things.   Let me set the scene for you.

The audience was fairly mixed in a typical Bay Area way- an Indian family seated to the right, some Chinese exchange students sitting up front and a smattering of Black and White folks sitting at the bar in the back.  I started to do my set which was going so-so.  It was one of those nights where I was doing my routine jokes as well as trying a few new ones, but honestly I was just going through the motions.  What I mean is I wasn't present with the audience the way most comedians should be every time they perform.  I actually scolded my self out loud on stage for not being present after one my jokes bombed and then I continued onwards with the material.  But internally,  I thought to my self, "its OK, you're doing fine, just keep going, try and be more present, but you're fine!"  

​So there I was doing my thang but before I realized it the mood changed real fast for me.  Because as soon I began my jokes involving my dad, the dad from said Indian family on the right started immediately aggressively heckling me.  What was interesting about his heckling was that he kept yelling out very specific questions during my set.  Now I'm always down to deal with a little heckle or two, but this dad was heckling me in the most intense way I've ever seen.  Intense to the point that I couldn't even get through saying my material.  Things like "Oh yeah, what does your father think about that joke?" or during one Lasik eye surgery joke, "Well, how much did you father pay for that Lasik eye surgery?"  It was the oddest most intense question-style heckling I've ever experienced.  

Well let me tell you I became real present real fast after that.  Again let me emphasize that I usually don't give a flying fuck about hecklers.  In fact, I actually kind of enjoy the occasional heckle because it allows me to mix up my set a little bit and I enjoy the variety from time to time.  But this guy wouldn't even let me speak!  And the idea of an Indian male trying to silence his female counterpart was so unbelievably triggering for me.  ESPECIALLY in the context of the jokes that I was doing about my dad.  So finally I stopped and said to the audience, “Guys, can we just give an applause break to this asshole already because he clearly needs attention and love right now that he never got from his wife who is sitting right next to him.” The audience loved it, cheered, applauded and then the man STFU for the rest of my set.  I finished my set, sat back down and quietly enjoyed the rest of the show.  But I could feel this man's irritation with me from the opposite end of the room.  And I knew something was going to go down later.  

At the end of the show, the Indian dad walked up to me and said “I want you to know that I am a comedian my self and I understand how comedy works."  He paused to make sure I understood the gravity of this sentence.  I stared back as blankly as possible.  He continued, "But I did not appreciate you calling me an asshole tonight. That was not OK at all for you to call me an asshole.”  

I knew I had a choice to either (1) blow up in his face and tell him to STFU/get lost since he was the one that heckled me in the first place or  (2) handle this with quiet grace and de-escalate the situation.  For reasons that I still do not completely understand I decided on Option (2).  I think I chose Option (2) because I was so shocked that he would come up to me after the show to scold me more about putting him in his place after HE heckled ME.  Sometimes I choose peace over anger in the moment when I am actively in shock/overwhelmed.  I don't know if this is a good thing or not because then what happens is that I bottle the anger in, spend way too much $$$ on therapy and end up writing blog posts about it months later.  

Anyway, I said “I’m sorry I called you an asshole on stage and I’m sorry if it hurt your feelings…I was just trying to do my set…”  He seemed pretty content with this response and started to turn around and walk away.  But before he started to walk away, I said “Wait, you said you’re a comedian? Whats your name?”  (I figured if he was a comedian in the Bay Area I would know who he is).  
“Vikram Pradesh.” (I did not recognize that name at all meaning if he was a comedian he was not at all active within the Bay Area community).
“Oh, ok, nice to meet you…I haven’t seen you around the scene yet… where do you usually perform?”
“Privately.”

And then he walked away.

Closing thoughts:  To be honest, I can’t help but wonder if I had been a man or a woman of any other ethnicity, would he have had the guts to say what he said to me after the show?  In hindsight, what I assume is that HE was deeply triggered by ME, my material, by the idea of an Indian woman speaking so openly and aggressively about her life and her frustrations.  I wonder if it went against everything he has been indoctrinated to believe as an Indian male?  I don't know.  All I know is that it is unfortunate that the fact that any woman of color would have to deal with these sorts of discriminations ever.  I know if I had been a white man or even a white woman, there is no way in hell this Indian dad would have even thought of heckling me the way he did.  Some people who I've talked to about this have said, "oh that's just the way the culture is".  And to that I say...what the fuck?  The culture?  As if I'm just supposed to be like "oh, ok! Culture it is!" and bottle up all of my feelings like a proper person.  Like that is some how supposed to make me feel better about what happened?  If that's the way the culture is, we need to change it.  I have more thoughts about this which I will write about in the next blog post.

In Part 1 of HGTKTCCHYCWH , I challenge the notion of accusing the Universe of being the horrible reason shitty things happen to us, especially when it comes to bad breakups.  Before anyone judges something like the Universe, it is first important to understand who and what the Universe is, where It came from and where It is heading too.   Let me try and explain...
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Before even accusing the Universe of not understanding our pain in this moment, we must understand the issues that the Universe, personified, has gone through first. The Universe has seem some shit, let me tell you. It all started out with a massive explosion, The Big Bang, when all life as we understand it was compacted into a microscopic, infinitesimally tiny particle. Think about that for a second as you read this article with your spaciously well-designed well-appropriated body frame. Now think of all those times in your life where you have felt cramped or in a space that was uncomfortably small. Have you ever been stuck in a completely full elevator and the air is getting hot and you are getting progressively more annoyed because you just want to get out of there? Or perhaps been to a concert that is way too crowded and you are getting squished, elbows jabbing into your ribs, mouth parched with thirst and you are just wondering if this was all worth it? Now imagine taking that entire experience, and then add all of your belongings, your family and then a couple more billion people and then smash all of that down into a tiny box smaller than the size of a thimble. Pretty uncomfortable, huh?  Forget about the fact that you would you be dead at this point, but just think about how freaking annoyed or angry or weird you would feel. Whatever you think you’d feel, amplify that emotion by a trillion and THAT, is just a tiny taste of what the Universe has been through.

Now, ask your self, after going through an experience like that, if a failed relationship or two is such a big deal after all. Honestly, can you really blame the Universe for not caring about you?

If you’re reading this and telling your self, “But you know what? This doesn’t make my pain feel any better” and your mind starts to trail back to the pain of your recent breakup, I ask you to ask yourself, if you think you're lonely now, how the hell do you think the god damn universe felt when there was literally NOTHING but destruction and lifelessness for the first 13 BILLION YEARS OF ITS LIFE. 13 BILLION YEARS. Assuming you’ll live to 100, that is like if you lived your life 130 million times and were single every lifetime except for now- when you finally get a chance to meet people and even start dating. Look into the present now.  Does it even matter that you dated a douchebag? After going through something like that, you can’t really come down on the universe for not giving a hot gaseous damn if you are going through a break up. If you want to blame something for your heartache, blame literally anything or anyone else EXCEPT LIFE ITSELF for your pain. ​

References:
1.Taylor, G. Jeffrey. "Wandering Gas Giants and Lunar Bombardment"
2. Joseph Silk (2009). Horizons of Cosmology. Templeton Press. p. 208
3. Simon Singh (2005). Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe. Harper Perennial. p. 560 

I was recently having a conversation with my friend about relationships and the quest for love. She had just broken up with her ex and was dealing with the very appropriate post-break-up “where did I go wrong?” analysis that is becoming of any person looking for love. At one point, amidst our barrage of intense psychoanalytic text messaging, she said to me the following: ​

What struck me about this interchange was not her “maybe we need to taste the sour to appreciate the sweet” notion, but rather her assumption that it is the universe in its entirety (from Big Bang to present) who is not only responsible, but “horrible” for doing such a thing.

I had to give my friend credit for representing the thought process of so many out there, my self included. I too have struggled many times with this “How dare the universe be so mean to me!?” question in my life, most recently after ending a string of serial relationships with multiple members of the United Nations of Douchebaggery.

Human beings are not strangers to processing thoughts like this especially when things go sour in life. Whether it is in a religious context “Why is God punishing me?” to a more atheistic “Why is the universe doing this to me?”, it is natural for the human mind to attribute blame to an entire system/world/universe/ existence to account for our individualized pain.

​But...is there a better way to handle at our pain?

​This is where I believe our understanding of modern science can show us another way to direct our thoughts. Because if we are going to personify and then blame the universe for putting us through our pain, we should probably first pause and take a hard look at the FACTS of developing universe before we call it as an asshole. Perhaps with a better understanding of science, we are offered an alternative way of coping with pain when our hearts break.

I'll explain this in Part 2 of How Getting to Know the Cosmos Can Help You Cope with Heartache (HGTKTCCHYCWH)

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