There’s a moment in every comedian’s career when they realise the jokes aren’t just for their friends anymore. For Prashasti Singh, that realisation hit somewhere in her early 30s – later than most, she’ll tell you, but maybe that’s why her comedy lands the way it does.
“I think growing up, becoming a comedian was never a thing for me,” she says over a a Zoom call from Mumbai, her voice carrying that same warm, storytelling quality that’s made her train journey videos rack up millions of views online. “But in college, around my friends, I did start seeing myself as the funny one in the group.”
Those friends became her first audience. But back then, in her early 20s, being the clown in the friend group felt like enough. It never occurred to her that strangers might one day be laughing along too.
Like many good Indian daughters, Prashasti followed the well-worn path first. MBA done, marketing job at Star TV in Bombay secured. Comedy was something she’d get to eventually, maybe, if life allowed.
“I started doing open mics around the time I was 29 or 30,” she explains. “It was a very well-thought-out move. I didn’t really have one of those stories where this was my passion and I left everything for it.”
Then came Comicstaan, a talent hunt that changed things. Within a year of treating stand-up as a hobby, the numbers started making sense. Her comedy income began matching her post-MBA salary – that reliable middle-class benchmark for “making it.”
This April, Prashasti brings her show Divine Feminine to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for the first time. She’s rewriting her Hindi material for English-speaking audiences, a challenge she first took on for the Edinburgh Festival.
“Definitely, if you’re a fan of my Hindi, you will miss the Hindi,” she admits. There’s something about those familiar expressions that hits different in the mother tongue. But she’s crafted this particular show differently. It’s less about anecdotal humour – those beautifully observed train ride stories her fans love – and more about insights.
“The insights, at least in my head, are fairly universal – about a working woman’s experience, or a woman in a man’s world.”
For Melbourne audiences wondering which show to catch, she’s got simple advice: “Come with your friends and spouses for the English show, and come with your parents for the Hindi one.”
The title Divine Feminine might sound like something from a wellness influencer’s Instagram, and honestly? That’s exactly where it started.
“There was a time when I was really struggling with all these ideas,” Prashasti shares. “I was feeling very pained. I was having an existential crisis.” Like many of us do when the big questions hit, she fell down a rabbit hole of TikTok and reels. Content about embracing feminine energy, about women being sad because they’re trying to be more like men – she consumed hordes of it, searching for answers.
“Am I doing something wrong by trying to be this career woman?” she’d wonder.
The show grew from that questioning. It’s about living your life trying to get everything men have, only to realise somewhere in your mid-30s that they’re not exactly thriving either. “Now we have all that men have, but we also have their depression and their sadness.”
There’s humour in that realisation.
Ask Prashasti what still gets to her, and she’s refreshingly honest. She’s secure about being single, secure about not wanting a partner anymore, secure about money. But call her old? Different story.
“I just cannot accept that,” she says. A recent trip to the US brought this home. Her friends there, with their families and kids, have embraced this life stage. They’re comfortable being older. “And I’m still like, what are you saying?”
It’s this kind of honesty – unpolished, recognisable, slightly uncomfortable – that makes her comedy stick.
When Prashasti started performing around 2017, the green rooms were mostly male. The audiences too. “It was always seen as an exception to have a woman on the line-up,” she remembers. “You start feeling like you are shrinking.”
Seven years later, the shift is real. More women are doing comedy, and crucially, more women are buying tickets. Her Indian audiences might still skew 60-40 male, but when she performs in London, it flips to 70 percent women.
“Women have started consuming comedy as something that could be meant for them,” she observes. And that’s changed what women comedians can talk about.
It’s not about menstruation jokes, she clarifies. It’s about the whole exhausting package – the expectation that you’ll work, manage a home, become a mother, and do it all with a smile. Finally, there’s an audience that gets it without needing it explained.
So what would she say to someone in Melbourne who’s never seen her before?
“For everyone from the subcontinent, come and witness a piece of life from the subcontinent and laugh at our shared pain. You know we relate through our pain.”
For the global audience, she offers something else: a window. “It’s a show that is funny, insightful, and also gives you a lot of context on who we are and where we come from.”
Back when she was figuring out if comedy could pay the bills, Prashasti had a simple measure: when the money from mics matched her corporate salary, she’d know it was real. These days, she’s less interested in defining what “good money” means.
“In India, the typical middle-class dream is to get a secure job if you are good at studies, and I had that,” she says. “For the few of us who have found an audience, it is financially viable. Some people are doing very well for themselves, some are doing okay. But even ‘okay’ is not bad.”
It’s a quietly revolutionary statement from someone who followed the rules, checked the boxes, and still ended up somewhere unexpected. Somewhere funnier.
Prashasti Singh performs ‘Divine Feminine’ at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Shows available in English and Hindi.
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