Broti Gupta’s Dog Has Brand Loyalty

Thanks to the coronavirus, comedians are now trapped at home like the rest of us, so we decided that while we’re all self-isolating, we’d do something a little different from our usual “Follow Friday� column. Instead of interviewing up-and-coming comedians we love on Twitter, we’re going live on Instagram every week to check in on some of our favorite people in comedy and get a firsthand look at how they’re handling the pandemic. So welcome to our new version of the column, now titled “Follow (From a Safe Distance) Friday.�

This week, in what can only be called heroic, I bravely rescued Broti Gupta (Speechless, Friends From College, evading my in-person gaze for going on three years) from the freezing L.A. wilderness by swindling her into an online chitchat about how she’s doing in the pandemic. She pondered the merits of Macaulay Culkin’s IP ownership of screaming in the mirror, waxed poetic about how she would fix the industry if she were Mr. Hollywood, and shared her hope that she will, one day, be able to kiss her friends on the mouth once more. She also got personal about what dog ownership means to her: “It’s very funny to see how much, when you adopt a dog, you can make them completely regress. My dog, a year ago, he was a stray … living on his own in the San Bernardino forest. And now he has brand loyalty. That’s all our doing: We took any survival instinct right out.�

You can find Broti on Instagram and Twitter at @brotigupta.