Prashasti Singh
There is something quietly poetic about manifestation, especially when it unfolds across continents, languages, and the fragile confidence of an artist daring to begin again. For Prashasti Singh, that moment is now.
Standing on a stage at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF), she is no longer the wide-eyed observer she once was in 2023, sitting in the audience and wondering if she would ever belong inside the circus of it all. Today, she does. And she knows exactly what it took to get here.
“I had this feeling – they are inside, and I am outside,” she recalls of her first MICF experience. It wasn’t just about access; it was about language, identity, and the unspoken hierarchy of global comedy circuits. As a Hindi comic, Prashasti had built a formidable voice back home. But festivals like MICF demanded something else: a leap into English, into unfamiliar rhythm, into vulnerability.
So she did the one thing comedians do best – she rewrote the punchline.
Divine Feminine, Singh’s first full-length English stand-up show, is part Indian story, part human story… and, by her own description, a party by the end. Originally written and performed in Hindi, she reconstituted it entirely in English for a global festival audience, jokes and all. The show runs at the Westin, Melbourne, as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Tuesday to Saturday at 7.40pm and Sunday at 6.40pm, until April 12.
Finding fame
Singh first found fame in 2018 as one of the top three finalists on the debut season of Amazon Prime Video’s Comicstaan and has since built one of Hindi stand-up’s more recognisable careers. She has appeared on Netflix’s Ladies Up, Comedy Premium League, and released the popular YouTube special Door Khadi Sharmaaye.
An Indian Institute of Management Lucknow graduate who walked away from a marketing career to do comedy, she draws much of her material from that exact biography: small-town Amethi, corporate life, and the specific texture of being a woman in her thirties. Over the years she has toured consistently across continents and extensively within India. Divine Feminine (in English) is her first time taking that work to an international festival stage.
Lost in translation, found in laughter
The shift from Hindi to English was not merely linguistic; it was existential. “I have a comedic brain in one language,” she says candidly. The fear wasn’t of failing jokes, but of losing instinct. Yet somewhere between trial shows and discarded lines, she discovered something quietly empowering – she may be sharper in Hindi, but she is far from lost in English.
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Her show, Divine Feminine, carries that duality. Rooted in Indian experience but shaped for a global audience, it lands, unexpectedly and beautifully, even with those far removed from her world.
“One of the biggest surprises,” she admits, “is when an older Aussie man tells me he loved the show.” It is in these moments that comedy transcends its demographic, reminding both performer and audience that humour, at its core, is deeply human.
The art of letting jokes die
Behind the effortless laughter lies a graveyard of jokes. Prashasti’s process is almost ritualistic in its honesty: “I make a lot of bad jokes to get to one good one.” Some die quietly in trial rooms. Others linger, waiting to be reborn in another context, another show, another year.
Comedy, in her world, is not about perfection. It is about persistence. And instinct.
Melbourne: Where work feels like play
For Prashasti, performing at MICF is not just about the stage; it is about the city that holds it. Melbourne, with its parks, cafés, and cultural pulse, becomes both playground and classroom.
“I love being employed here,” she laughs, half-joking about the freelance artist’s paradox,ie, half a day of work, the rest spent soaking in a city that makes ambition feel possible. There is humour in the everyday too, in libraries that feel “too crowded for Australia,” in parks that Indians treat like luxury experiences, and in one universal immigrant truth – we’re not stealing jobs, we’re chasing clean air.
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When humour becomes survival
Beneath the laughter lies a more complex truth, one that Indian comedians increasingly grapple with. In a world where offence is unpredictable and reactions disproportionate, Prashasti speaks of a deeper loss: not just of free speech, but of free thought. “You develop a personality that takes a roundabout way of saying things,” she reflects. The fear is not always external; it becomes internalised, quietly shaping what artists dare, or don’t dare, to say.
Even on international stages, that hesitation lingers. And yet, she persists.
Because humour, for her, is not escape. It is coping.
“I think a lot of female humour is coping humour,” she says, almost matter-of-factly, born not from the need to impress, but from the need to survive. To laugh at a world that often refuses to be fair.
Vulnerability, the new punchline
What MICF has given her, perhaps more than anything else, is exposure to a different kind of comedy, one that leans into vulnerability rather than away from it. Watching artists like Lara Ricotti and Josie Long, she found herself moved, not just amused. “You can speak from the heart, be emotional, and still make people laugh,” she says, as though discovering a new grammar of storytelling.
It is a lesson she is still absorbing, one that may shape the next version of her voice.
A tagline for the journey
If there were a tagline for this chapter of her life, Prashasti Singh has already coined it, with characteristic wit: Now available in both languages.
It is funny, yes. But it is also quietly profound. Because this is not just about language. It is about expansion, about stepping into spaces that once felt out of reach, about reclaiming voice even when the world asks you to soften it.
Somewhere between Hindi and English, between India and Australia, between fear and freedom, Prashasti Singh is doing what comedians do best.
She is finding the joke that lands.
Read more: Mark Silcox: Striking comedy gold
