Aparna Nancherla
w/Cher Hann and Sandi Rankaduwa
Wednesday, April 5, 9pm
The Seahorse Tavern, 2037 Gottingen Street
$20
"As comedians, it is up to us to overturn and shake and deconstruct and weigh every system that governs life," wrote Aparna Nancherla in the Village Voice last December, after Donald Trump had been elected but before he'd taken office. "This work, my work, feels more active now, more important."
"In general I haven't done a lot of overtly political material in the past," says Nancherla from her home in New York. "But since the election it feels hard not to talk about it on stage, in terms of the climate and how things are feeling."
Nancherla's comedy—you may have caught her at the Pop Explosion in October; she returns Wednesday for a set at the Seahorse—is of the wry observational style, the kind that offers up all facets, from home offices to online dating to surviving New York ("there are feral models, just wandering the streets, that nobody warns you about"). So Trump is getting into her set, but she's staying true to her form. "It's a push and pull," she says. "I wrote in that article that it is true you can't really minimize the impact of what's happening, but at the same time you can't stop living your life."
Her resume reads like a dream—she's trained with institutional titans the Groundlings and Upright Citizens Brigade (she hosts the weekly show Whiplash at UCB), appeared on Conan, in episodes of Inside Amy Schumer, Love, Crashing and the next season of Master of None, made a web series called Womanhood with Jo Firestone, and last year released an album, Just Putting it Out There.
Nancherla is into all of it. "The cool thing about having done comedy for a certain number of years," she says, "is now there's more digital content, there are more platforms to make different shows. There are so many different paths now, you can't always predict you'd end up there."