ADITYA GAUTAM is a Noida-born, Melbourne-based stand-up comedian and author of ‘Pornistan: How to Survive the Porn Epidemic in India’. Aditya Gautam was a state finalist at the 2020 RAW Comedy competition and is the co-founder of Multicultural Comedy.
You’ve described yourself as an introvert but within eight months of starting stand-up you made it to the RAW comedy finals – what changed?
I’m an introvert, always will be. Nothing has changed. What they say about introverts is that talking to people drains our energy… I realised if I’m talking about something I’m feeling passionate about, then I want to talk, I just don’t want to have a conversation. I just want to moan a lot, so stand-up comedy is perfect… it’s not a conversation. I get up on stage. I tell people what I think about things and then I get off!
Obviously, there’s still an aspect of being on stage and everybody looking at you which I still struggle with after having done it for about five years. If I don’t do it for a few weeks, I feel very nervous, it doesn’t come naturally. But another reason why I started stand-up was because I thought this is something I can beat.
View this post on Instagram
In Pornistan, your book about India’s sexual revolution, you coin the term ‘porn epidemic’ – what do you mean by this?
Around 2010, Reliance came up with Jio, and started giving away very cheap broadband across India…right now, 5G internet [in India] is one of the cheapest on the planet. When I was studying, there was zero sex education; there was this one stupid little chapter about sexual organs which our teacher skipped. Still in India, there is very little sex education, but easy access to high-speed pornography. Combine the two and you have a porn epidemic, where everyone’s accessing pornography to understand sexuality and fulfill their desires to know more about sex.
If you do a rudimentary search on a porn website, what you see is not normal sex…that’s not how you want an entire population learning…it’s very damaging. A doctor I interviewed for this book had a perfect expression: ‘watching porn for sex education is like watching The Fast and the Furious to learn driving.’
You’ve written a book about porn, and your debut show, ‘Don’t Call Me a Papadum’, is based on a racist incident you had in your early years of migrating – what draws you to such difficult topics?
When I think about doing any art related endeavour, the likelihood that you’ll make money from it is very low. So, your driving force can never be, ‘I’m going to make money out of this’… I wrote that book because I really wanted an 18-year-old me to have that book to tell them the downsides of pornography. Same with the comedy show, I wanted to tell people about the Indian perspective of life in Australia, for non-Indians to see what we’re feeling and thinking. I feel that comedy is such a great way to bring people together…to get people to understand Indians and make us realise that we’re all the same.
All this wanting to tell a very real [story] sounds great, but how do you actually make it funny? It’s super hard and to be honest, I’m still learning how to do it. I still haven’t mastered it. There are times when I’m doing that show where I can see I people are struggling to find it funny… it’s a hard balance.
What’s something that you’re currently listening to/reading/playing/watching?
Someone I’ve only recently started listening to but is already one of my all-time favourite comedians is Mike Birbiglia…I’ve been listening to his shows and watching his documentary.
I’m obsessing about Indian elections these days…I even made a couple of jokes. Indian politics is the most entertaining thing that could ever be, so if you follow that, you don’t need books or Netflix subscriptions, there’s just so much happening in it all the time!
What’s a word that you like in a South Asian language, and what does it mean?
There’s a local community in Noida, Gujjars, and we use a lot of their words in our Hindi as well. So, this word that I absolutely love is called ‘Bhasaad’. There’s no exact word for it in English, which is what makes it beautiful…It’s this feeling when there’s too much happening, that’s ‘bhasaad’.
I would say ‘bhasaad’ if someone asks me ‘how’s life going these days?’ Or if you went to the mall: ‘How was it?’ ‘Well, there was bhasaad in the mall’, like, there were too many people.
And finally: Soan Papdi or Papdi Chaat?
Soan Papdi, because I’m not a chaat fan, which is a controversial thing to say for someone who lives around Delhi. I’m not a fan of Soan Papdi either but if I’m given an option, I’d choose it over Papdi Chaat.
READ MORE HERE: Christopher Gurusamy: A dancer making an emotional connection
