Sonali Thakker is on stage, running frantically on the spot while yelling after an imaginary vehicle.
“Let me tell you, my orgasms are like running after a bus,” she says, delivering the punchline.
The crowd laughs hesitantly.
Performing at the opening night of the Bengaluru Comedy Festival, it's clear that the stand-up comedian has no qualms talking frankly about sex in front of a crowd, especially when it comes to men not pulling their weight in the bedroom.
The 29-year-old comic has earned a reputation for being direct and unafraid of shocking her audience. But she hasn’t always done sets about sex.
Sonali Thakker performing on stage at the Bengaluru comedy festival. Source: Supplied
“I think I was the last one to properly have sex among all of my friends because, in India, especially in a middle class conservative house, you are taught that sex is bad. It’s not something you do before you get married,” she tells SBS Life.
Thakker has cultivated a following by speaking her mind honestly and without a filter.
Her content has made conversations about women having sex more normal for her female fans. As one woman in the audience said: “In other spaces where we go out, the conversation [about sex] is more common than it used to be."
She added: “It doesn’t seem like a big deal anymore.”
But Thakker says she doesn’t deliberately set out to be provocative.
“These are just the things me and my six girlfriends talk about. But I perform it to an auditorium of 600 people. It’s honestly what makes me laugh in day-to-day conversations and I take it to the stage to see how other people react to it."
“I’m never thinking about what needs to be spoken about or what the audience wants to hear from me. If you go to change what exists in India that is a long road and if you think about how long the road is you will be tired and you will never do anything.”
Thakker lives with her parents in Mumbai and says they are still adapting to her nocturnal lifestyle.
“They come home and that’s when I step out. It’s not the easiest lifestyle for Indian parents to work around because they’ve never seen anything like this,” she says.
“My parents are literally the first generation of parents who have watched a female stand-up comic working.”
Thakker’s parents still don’t entirely accept the fact that she’s a full-time stand up comic and have never seen one of her shows, but they’ve never tried to stop her performing.
“They think it’s a hobby. For them, it just looks like their daughter leaves for three hours at night and she comes home,” she jokes.
In fact, Thakker concedes that her parents are more worried about the influence of other comedians.
“Even if they come [to a show], I might do normal material but I can’t control what the other comedians do," she says.
Thakker has received criticism for some of the content in her Netflix special, ‘Almost There’ about her family, career and dating life, where she shares how she went from being an aspiring chartered accountant to making people laugh for a living. Reflecting on the show's run, Thakker recalls an interaction with one male audience member.
“I did it once and a guy came up to me and said ‘My wife had a great time but I think you talk a lot about being a woman’. I don’t have a habit to retaliate on the spot, so two days later I was in the shower and I was like, ‘As opposed to what?’ That’s all I know about,” she says.
But that doesn’t stop her. During her opening night performance, Thakker joked about the double standards women experience in the bedroom. “Guys always try to get out of giving you head. Suddenly they’re tired,” she rolls her eyes at the audience.
When asked whether she’s afraid to call people out, she responds: “You have to make them realise it’s that kind of night. The minute you call them out, you level with them and they’re on the same page as you and you carry on with the rest of the stuff you have written.”
The author traveled to India as part of , a University of Technology Sydney (UTS) program supported by the New Colombo Plan (NCP) mobility grants.
