Gender and comedy: AIB's Rohan Joshi and Gursimran Khamba share their views on the eternal debate

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posted on 9 years ago — updated on 1 second ago

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The YouTube sensations who were in the capital recently for a press conference for OML's 'The Comedy Hunt on YouTube', had to say that comedy worldwide is gendered and that the problem of fewer women taking up comedy is a global phenomenon.

Rohan Joshi and Gursimran Khamba of AIB feel that there is a dearth of women in the comedy fraternity, and that something needs to be done to revive the situation. The YouTube sensations who were in the capital recently for a press conference for OML's 'The Comedy Hunt on YouTube', had to say that comedy worldwide is gendered and that the problem of fewer women taking up comedy is a global phenomenon.

In the recent past AIB had been on a spree of hiring female writers for "fresh perspectives on stuff", when enquired about the same, Gursimran Khamba of AIB said, "We got a lot of interesting entries, but it is a little premature to talk about that right now. All I want to say is that we are very happy we went ahead with the move and are looking forward to getting more people on board."

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Speaking of the global situation, Khamba added, "The good thing about the global situation is that we have seen female comedians like Amy Schumer break stereotypes, and do something different. It's one of those perennial things which happen every now and then, you have these moments of break outs where one or two people do it."

Echoing the same view, Rohan Joshi said, "For that matter one of YouTube's biggest stars is Superwoman, who is a female comedian." On being asked whether they had to be biased or "generous" towards women while short-listing contestants for the Comedy Hunt, Khamba said, "Not at all, funny is funny, gender no bar. We got a lot of female entries. One noticeable difference however was, that they were more of Vlogs, evidently influenced by Superwoman, which is understandable."

Speaking about the same issue, Biswa Kalyan Rath said, "I think when a woman goes on stage, she has a lot of societal judgements to deal with. A guy doesn't have to deal with those, this is a very complex issue, I don't understand why though. I have met as many funny females as males."