There’s an easy charm to Prashasti Singh’s demeanour when she’s on stage, an inherent likeability that pulls you into her stories and makes you want to root for her. Even as a relative newcomer—performing jokes about small-town romance and MBA dreams on season one of comedy competition show Comicstaan—she displayed the supreme self-confidence of a natural born performer. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to find out that, for much of her life, the Amethi-born Mumbai-based comedian had a deathly fear of public speaking. 

“I tried public speaking in Class 6, in a debate competition, and it was a disaster,” she laughs, talking over the phone from Amsterdam ahead of her upcoming tour with new show Man Of The House. “It was the kind of disaster where you were booed off the stage, And I decided that this is something I just can’t do.” 

It’s not that she lacked self-confidence, or that she was wary of the limelight. Growing up in Amethi’s HAL township, Singh was an excellent student (“my biggest problem in life then was that I always came second”) who danced to Bollywood songs at the school’s annual function and was always the centre of attention in her class. While studying engineering at NSIT in Delhi, she joined the college dance team and took part in student theatre, and continued to dabble in thespian performance while working in Bengaluru. When she moved to Mumbai in 2016 to take up a job at Star India, she channelled her creative energies into improv. But public speaking remained a source of fear, only amplified by the sense that her Amethi-accented English wasn’t good enough in comparison to her private school educated peers.

“I could go on stage and play a character, but I just could never break the fourth wall,” she says. “But the good thing about me is that I test my phobias every once in a while. So, around the time that people were starting to get excited about the open mic thing, I decided to test my phobia again.”

Early in 2017, Singh worked up the courage—encouraged by comedian friends Sumukhi Suresh and Jeeya Sethi, whom she met through improv—and walked onto an open mic stage, telling one of the many stories she would usually entertain friends with. This time, she actually enjoyed herself. “I realised that when I’m not worried about my language, then I’m okay,” she says. “Because the great thing about comedy is that it’s my thoughts that matter. They can be in English, Hindi, slang, whatever. So long as the thought is getting communicated.” 

Singh was hooked. The next time she took to an open-mic stage, she bombed, but the fear no longer had its grip on her. She continued performing at open mics, honing her wit and developing her comedic persona—the small-town girl alternatingly amused and bemused by the big city. Comedy—like theatre before it—was a way to find fulfilment outside of her job, an outlet for the parts of her that didn’t fit into the box of an engineering-MBA-marketing career. Even when she was invited to participate in the first season of Comicstaan, she didn’t think of it as anything more than a fun hobby. 

“I was working at Star, thinking I’m going to be a kingmaker tomorrow,” she says, adding that she took a sabbatical for the Comicstaan shoot. “You know, I’m going to be the person who decides what runs on TV. That was a career I was investing in. There was no thought that I’d ever quit my job.” 

In August 2018, with more and more live shows on her calendar, Singh did just that. Her Comicstaan appearance had already marked her out as a comedian to watch, and she followed it up with a much-loved 15-minute set as part of Netflix’s Ladies Up special. She spent much of 2019 working on her debut solo show, and already had a deal on paper with a streaming platform for its eventual release. But just as she was settling into a new rhythm and coming to terms with this sudden shift in careers, the pandemic hit. 

The COVID-19 years were hard on everyone, and Singh struggled to come to terms with the disruption. There were financial fears—she had just quit a high-paying job—of course, though Zoom shows and brand-work made up for some of the lost revenue from live shows. But the bigger anxieties were creative. She was writing her debut show, but now she had no way to test it on the stage. More frustratingly, she just couldn’t get her head around Reels, which had suddenly become the primary means for comedians to maintain some sort of visibility on the pop culture landscape. 

“There was a lot of internal and external pressure to make Reels, so I tried it, but I quickly figured out that I just don’t have the talent for it,” she says. “I only know how to do standup. For a while, I was like ‘oh my god, is my career over if I can’t make Reels?’” 

Bollywood has made many of us. That’s why even when you look back and cringe at some of those movies, you can’t deny that it’s a part of you. Emotionally, a lot of my writing comes from Bollywood.

So while other comedians were saturating our social media timelines with short-form videos, podcasts and other types of “snackable content,” Singh retreated to her living room and worked on her standup. In Zoom shows, she found a workable alternative to the trial shows she could no longer do, testing out material from her solo special to small, entertainment-starved audiences. “I feel like on Zoom you can bomb more easily, everyone has lower stakes,” she says. “I think that really helped me put together my first special Door Khadi Sharmaaye because I could try out a lot more stuff and I could try it out very frequently. People were so bored, they’d just show up to watch it.”

Once the lockdowns had lifted, she was finally able to take the special on tour, performing throughout 2021 and the first half of 2022. After a year-and-a-half on the road, Singh began to tire of the material, but she didn’t know what to do with it. The earlier streaming platform deal had fallen through because of the pandemic, and there were no new offers on the table. “By January 2023, I was ready to discard it and start on a new show, because it just wasn’t fun anymore,” Singh says. “But I decided to do one recording of the whole show in Bengaluru, because the audience there is warm, and see if it works. And it magically did work.” 

Released on YouTube in four parts, Door Khadi Sharmaaye is a great showcase of what makes Singh such a fantastic comedic voice. There’s an intimacy to her performance, a guileless sincerity that makes you cheer for her as she talks about her romantic escapades, and empathise with her when they eventually end in pain or embarrassment. Insightful personal anecdotes are punctuated with superb physical comedy (there’s even some pretty hilarious choreography). The material is steeped in the zeitgeist of 90s Bollywood rom-coms—the show’s tentative name was Dil Toh Pagal Hai—that Singh loves, though not uncritically. 

“Bollywood has made many of us,” she says. “That’s why even when you look back and cringe at some of those movies, you can’t deny that it’s a part of you. It’s not that it’s a motif or a tool that I use, it’s just something that comes out naturally. Emotionally, a lot of my writing comes from Bollywood.”

In October, Singh became a Bollwood rom-com insider herself, as co-writer on Karan Boolani’s sex-comedy film Thank You For Coming, alongside Radhika Anand. She took the job because she discovered an instantaneous connection with Anand, as is evident from her Instagram posts featuring the two dancing along to 90s Bollywood classics. “I would definitely like to work on more movies, but I think I can afford to be picky, because I do have one career that’s my primary career,” she says. “The great thing about doing standup is that you can choose to work on a movie that excites you and you can also be a little detached from it. You get involved creatively, but how the movie does at the box office doesn’t affect your career very much.”

One day, Singh wants to write a full-length feature film, but for now she’s only at the “wants to write” stage. With projects like Thank You For Coming, she’s building the skills to make that dream a reality. In the meantime, she’s busy with her new show Man Of The House, which she’s taking on a three month tour starting 4 November. As the name suggests, the show revolves around her household, and the monumental power struggle between Singh, her brother and her mother over who gets to be the family ‘patriarch’. 

“A lot of the show is actually about family insights, but the core of it is how we have our own biases towards gender stereotypes,” she explains. “Like I behave like a man a lot of the time, but then I see a reel with a woman saying ‘where is your divine feminine?’ And I’m like ‘oh shit, where is my divine feminine. I don’t want to lose my divine feminine!’ So even when we are given the opportunity to be who we are, the choices we make are quite confused.”