This week, we’re highlighting 24 talented writers and performers for Vulture’s annual list “The Comedians You Should and Will Know.†Our goal is to introduce a wider audience to the talent that has the comedy community and industry buzzing. (You can read more about our methodology at the link above.) We asked the comedians on the list to answer a series of questions about their work, performing, goals for the future, and more. Next up is Rekha Shankar.
Tell us a story from your childhood that you think might explain why you ended up becoming a comedian.
As a kid, I was never a physical risk-taker but was always a mental risk-taker. So on my mental résumé, I’ve helped the Rugrats stand up to Angelica for being rude, I’ve helped beat people up with the Rock (who is my older brother in this scenario), I’ve been a secret agent who single-handedly saved the only other Indian girl that was in my school (from what? I don’t know).
One day in second grade, I had a new imagined scenario, so asked my friend Jessica, “What if it was good to be bad and bad to be good? Would we change from being good kids to being bad kids just because now it was good to be bad? Would I wear a little leather vest and a backward hat and start wearing red (my least favorite color)?†And she said, point blank, “You’re an idiot.†Wait, really? Just for thinking out loud with one of my closest colleagues? Did she know I didn’t buy the leather vest (yet)? Aren’t we just having fun, swapping childhood what-ifs? But then I thought, Wait, I’m not an idiot. You’re just boring. And from then on, my life’s goal became laughing and having dumb ideas. Just like Jessica’s life goal probably became correcting people and being sad.
If you were immortalized as a cartoon character, what would your outfit be?
Thank God you’re asking this. For the longest time, I loved how cartoons dressed. I remember on As Told by Ginger they actually changed her outfits, which was revolutionary for my tween brain and my understanding-of-cartoons brain. I particularly loved when cartoons had giant shoes? I don’t know.
So I would want an army jacket, a mustard-yellow shirt, nondescript straight-leg dark blue jeans, and dark brown Timberlands. The Lindsay from Freaks and Geeks treatment. If anyone can hook me up with ten of this outfit, I will #notanad or #ad it on Instagram. Whatever you want.
What’s your proudest moment/achievement of your comedy career so far?
I am really proud of the feature I wrote. I had never written one before and was nervous because it’s such a daunting and challenging process, but now I have written, revised, and finished one, and I actually like it, and that rules. It’s a comedy about grief (with a sci-fi hook!), and I didn’t know I could write something that doesn’t have someone making a joke every minute or falling down a greasy staircase into a bucket of feathers and now they’re “Mrs. Chicken†or whatever.
I’ve always loved hard jokes, physical jokes, farce, and comedies that are so dense with humor you could watch them a hundred times and not catch everything, but I’ve also admired when people mix serious topics with comedy but was really intimidated by it, too. In fact, when I saw The Farewell, I was like, Wow, Lulu Wang made the funniest and most heartfelt movie. Too bad it’s been made now and it was perfect, I wish I had written that, too bad I didn’t and never will because I probably can’t, bye. But now, after writing my own feature, I feel that same way about my own script! I look at it and go, Wait, this is the movie I should have written about something I did, in fact, just write, and there are no banana peels or buckets of feathers. So I’m really proud of that.
Additionally, I’m proud I made the sexy Kirby sketch.
Which comedian’s career trajectory would you most like to follow?
Because you let me type my own answers, you’re going to get many answers.
Tim Robinson is my favorite comedian. I love how it always feels like he’s being himself, and he continues to reinvent the world of sketch, characters, and comedy by just experimenting and not caring if it’s “too weird.†I think sometimes mainstream audiences are too quick to pass over comics like that and then they never get a chance to cook and try more and eventually find their niche, and I am so grateful he has gotten to do all of that. Sam Richardson too. God, he’s so funny.
I also love Quinta Brunson. I love that she has a background in working on the internet, as so many of us do, and parlayed those skills into professional sketch writing and then eventually her own incredible TV show that she stars in. That is so hard to do. And it rules that she did it. Also: Go Birds.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is unbelievably funny and continues to make revolutionary work every decade of her career, and I would love to have done everything she’s done.
I also admire Edi Patterson and Amy Sedaris. I love that they have these improv and sketch and character backgrounds and have done so many roles that seem tailor-made for their exact senses of humor. Edi can be big and insane and grounded, and Amy can pop into your favorite show and say the funniest line and then pop out. What a dream. Can someone let me do that? Thanks.
Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
My indie improv team and I once performed a set for a youth group in Long Island at a hotel ballroom. They were teenagers who went on this retreat every year, and on the last day, a magician would do a show, but this year we replaced the magician. We were early, so saw the tail end of the event they were at before our show, which was a lecture about death. The teens then filed into our room and saw their beloved magician was not there, and was replaced with random 20-something-year-old improvisers, and they became sad. They sat down and then one of the hosts announced, “And now: improv!†We tried to explain what that was, but I don’t think they wanted to hear it, and maybe we were also nervous and weird.
We performed in this giant ballroom with stand-up-style microphones and no other amplification, which is bad for improv. All their suggestions were weird sexual slang that we didn’t understand, and when we’d ask what it meant, they just laughed at us and didn’t explain. Then when we started performing, they were either talking the whole time and we had to shush them, or they would imitate our object work from the audience to make fun of us. At one point, I think one of the teens made fun of my “Indian accent†(I was born in New England), so we pulled him onstage mid-scene to embarrass him, but he didn’t care because teens at that time didn’t have shame. We left the moment the set was over.
What have you learned about your own joke-writing process that you didn’t know when you started?
I promise this will relate, but I used to be a competitive punner. And sometimes you’d get a topic (e.g., “body partsâ€) and would get so stuck on one train of thought (Okay, here’s possible joke fodder: arms, legs, head, neck, fingers, toes …) and you’d stay on that train for a while and then reach your limit and think, Okay, I’ve run out of “body parts.†There’s no more source material to mine. It’s done. And you’d forget to make sure you are also hopping on other trains (“Body parts†also = organs: heart, lungs, stomach … “Body parts†also = specific parts of a body part: cerebellum, corpus callosum, hippocampus … “Body parts†also = stuff that sticks out of body: toenails, teeth … ). And I’ve taken that lesson with me when pitching jokes in a room or for my own work. There are always more joke alts. Even when you think you’ve hit the end, there are always more. Take a walk. Watch a dumb YouTube video. Let your brain wander. Hop on another train.
What’s the biggest financial hurdle you’ve encountered since becoming a comedian?
I am trying to seek funding for my feature, and it’s wild. Picture a number. Now add every number to the beginning and end of it, and that’s how much features cost. And the type of people who have that money are actually businesses, and businesses all have their own timelines and agendas. So I know already I am at least partially going to self-fund the feature, and maybe that’s a good thing, because it seems like a way to make sure your vision stays true and to get to keep the director and crew you love.
But then you encounter this hurdle: “How?†I love a challenge, but a movie? My God. Where do you even begin? How much money do you put into a thing that someone could write a scathing post of on their off-brand Substack even though they watched it entirely on the toilet and it downloaded a virus onto your computer just to read the review? Do you do what Sylvester Stallone did and put every cent of money you have into Rocky and just pray it becomes successful? Is that only a story because it’s an exception? Because there’s a world where if you do that and the movie is middling or tanks, you become a cautionary tale of someone who was stubborn and didn’t listen and blew all their money on a “bad idea.†This industry loves to make a narrative out of someone’s career after the result has occurred, but in reality, we can’t predict literally anything. And that inability to predict what is a good financial gamble or not remains a huge hurdle.
At the end of the movie 8 Mile, Eminem’s character, B-Rabbit, starts his final battle rap by dissing himself so the person he’s battling has nothing left to attack. How would you roast yourself so the other person would have nothing to say?
I’m a pretty literal person. Are you asking me to write a rap? Because the idea of me doing that makes me sick.
But I know raps are written out of passion and emotion to process feelings, and I do that with lists. So here is my (8 Mile–style) to-do list:
✅ I think I’m doing everything [fuckin’] wrong
✅ Every two [fuckin’] years I wrongly think I can pull off the “Waif Madewell Girl†look
✅ I [am a bum who] can’t speak Tamil
✅ I [fuckin’] talk too much
✅ I can’t see the [goddamned] forest for the trees
✅ I have never seen [fuckin’] Star Wars
✅ I don’t know how to [fuckin’] swim
When it comes to your comedy opinions — about material, performing, audience, trends you want to kill/revive, the industry, etc. — what hill will you die on?
Bring back multicams. Give us 22-episode seasons. Green-light video sketch shows. Hire curly-haired people. Stop making me watch “awkward†characters whose only “awkward†trait is saying “um†a thousand times. More David Hyde Pierce. More Sharon Horgan. More Philadelphia accents. Don’t make everyone add 15 slashes to their job title to exist in the industry. Show stretch marks. Pay support staff better. Pay animation writers the same as live-action writers. Stop asking for stars to be attached. Find a sharper take on improv or influencers than them being “dumb.†Do more shows about food. Do fewer shows that look gray and blue.
And for fellow writers: There are other Indian last names besides Patel and Shah.
What is the best comedy advice, and then the worst comedy advice, you’ve ever received?
A couple “worst†pieces of advice:
- Any advice that tells you to follow a trend will likely not pan out, because once you follow a trend just to follow it, you will have an expectation that this is “good†and will “yield a result,†which is the opposite of how anything in this industry works. Use the trend as inspiration, not a box.
- Once I wanted to play a “dumb†character for a sketch, and someone remarked to me “Well, all the characters are dumb†— as in, “Find a new thing.†And so, I didn’t play dumb. But your “dumb†and my “dumb†will never be the same. I didn’t realize that, because it was a friend telling me, and I was like, All friends are always right. But the message I ingested was that I was doing something wrong. And I do that a lot — let someone or something make me feel like I’m doing something wrong. So as an expert on this feeling, I can say, “Don’t let it happen to you or else you’ll never try anything.†Go ahead and maybe do it wrong. It’s better than never trying it at all.
And the best piece of advice I have heard goes in tandem with that. I once watched a True Hollywood Story on Heidi Klum, and she said something like, “Plenty of people will say ‘no’ to you, so you can’t say ‘no’ to yourself,†and that really stuck with me. You just have to try and fail and know it’s okay, because it will lead you somewhere you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. But don’t take yourself out of the game! Then you never get to try. And while this quote from Heidi Klum wasn’t comedy advice, per se (she is a model who happens to be funny because she dressed up as a worm), I have taken it with me for a long time.
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