"Do you know anyone here?” is not a question I get asked often in Lahore. Not so much because everyone knows everyone - although sometimes it feels that way! - but because I’ve found Lahoris treat unsolicited conversational openings like viral plagues. Ask a stranger at an event a simple “So what brings you here?” and they’ll start walking away from you backwards, maintaining terrified eye contact until they’ve made it far enough to turn around and flee from followup questions.
So it was that when a young girl leaned over and asked me if I knew anyone at the event, I too began to shuffle away. Not that there was far to go. We were both sitting on floor cushions in a house that had been retrofitted as a intimate performance space. There were about 50 other people scattered around what must have been a drawing room at one point but now looked like a cool warehouse space. We were all waiting for a stand up comedy show to start in the well-lit clearing at the far side of the room, to which I had been invited by a friend to see some members of the stand-up comedy troupe group Auratnaak (great name) perform their monologues. I’d hear about Auratnaak before. They are a collective of women comedians performing stand-up routines based on a very honest take on what it is like to be a woman in Pakistan. Sadly I had yet to see them live. But from what I’d heard they were sharp, irreverent, enjoyably and funny.
When I told her my story, she she smiled and said she didn’t know anyone there at all. It was such a genuine, disarming confession that we began chatting. It turns out that she and her friend had stumbled upon a poster for the event on Instagram, and decided to drive over to see the show. Without knowing anyone or anything about it, they drove over, bought tickets and were now waiting for the show to begin. I don’t know why the idea of them doing this struck me so strongly. I suppose it’s because it reminded me that things like stand-up comedy and plays (and so much more) all exist in an almost bootleg culture. Their information is passed through whispers and coded WhatsApp groups, ever vigilant and always watchful. The implication is the event is under some unseen, unheard threat - one that if it made its way in through unvetted soured could do some serious damage. That spectre of doom that surrounds so much public life and space in Pakistan doesn’t encourage the kind of spontaneity that this girl had displayed. This was emphasized a few mixtures layer when the MC of the event gave a very grave announcement that no one was allowed to record the event or take pictures. From what I know, that’s a usual request in stand-up shows - made in order to protect the work of the comics from plagiarism etc. But here the need for secrecy seemed urgent. As my friend said later, the very act of women talking unfiltered becomes political.
Audience at a stand-up event
The show included three women performing several short monologues, one after another, which were occasionally inter-spliced with funny covers of pop songs. The first was a wife, mother and writer, while the second two were younger women foraying into the dark waters of dating in Lahore. The show was hilarious. I have something called Resting B Face, which means my default blank expression looks like I want to kill someone, so I’ve never really taken to comedy shows nor they to me. But I couldn’t stop grinning throughout. It wasn’t just the comedy, which was funny, or the satirical undercurrents, which were sharp. It was that here was the first time I was seeing comedy about familiar things. About living in Pakistan, being from Pakistan, relating to Pakistan, about the biases and contradictions that we inhabit daily but are never allowed to joke about. For years I’ve been seeing clips of stand-up bits by American and English comedians, and laughing at them too, never once pausing to ask myself whether I know enough about their culture to find their humor funny. Why? Because funny is universal. That’s why when Trevor Noah goes on for five minutes about his South African mother running after him with a shoe, we laugh: because we don’t have to be a biracial South African to understand him.
But we often take for granted how little of our own representation we see. And how few times we see ourselves - in our regular, humdrum existences - as being worthy of being the subject of a story. As far as I can tell the only way people get their stories out there is to tell them themselves. And that’s how these women from Auratnaak do such a remarkable job. Meandering the comedic minefields of post-martial sex, children, gender hierarchies, dating, pre-martial sex, love, hate, breakups and more, the comics remind us about the universal by sharing the personal. And that is a feat so rare in our contemporary culture that it can be mistaken for activism. And it is, in a way. But its also funny, and most importantly, it’s truth.
