Unapologetically brown and delightfully besharam, Brown Women Comedy is back better than ever at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival. 

The show boasts an impressive array of comedians from all around the world, both emerging and well-established in their craft and all unequivocally brown in their own experiences. The Melbourne cast features Gauri B, Shyaire Ganglani, Yasmin Kassim, Sashi Perera, Urvi Majumdar, and Daizy Maan, who also produced the show. Daizy, Gauri, and Yasmin perform every night, and then it’s a rotating mix of the other three every night. 

Every single comedian in the line-up brought a unique electric energy to the show. Truly a thaali’s worth of diversity, everyone brought something incredibly distinct, vulnerable and hilarious to the table. From the familiar stories of conservative family members, puzzling uncles in the community and microaggressions to the less familiar in-depth investigations into queerness, sex, and childlessness, the show hit every possible angle it could in an 8-minute runtime. It was almost jarring at first to see this style of comedy from brown women, and then doubly confronting to check me and my friends’ initial reactions. It was an ode to the absurdity of the brown woman experience; all the trials and tribulations of womanhood battling within a case so deeply profiled by the entire world.      

The show’s reception hasn’t been without controversy. Comments were quickly turned off on their ABC article after the comments section was flooded with hate and incredulity at the concept of there being a ‘brown women’ comedy show. But controversy seems like just another part of the brown woman experience, one which no one shied away from poking fun at. Comedy, however, isn’t a direct line of shared experience from comedian to audience member; it’s the shared themes, human nature, love, and loss. Almost every single member of the audience found something to laugh about at some point in the night from shared hardships and heartbreak, in a touchingly human way.

The truth is, even if the show wasn’t excellent, it doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. I still loved every minute of it. Excellence isn’t what comedy is about. Comedy has always been about interrogating social norms and boundaries, both those from society and those we internalise within ourselves. And it's about damn time brown women got a shot on the stage after years of observing society on the side-lines. Stand-up, the stereotypical white-man side quest in his quarter-life crisis, shouldn’t be just his anymore. Open the damn gates of mediocrity! 

Seeing so many of the women on stage just try, becoming more confident, more sure of themselves, and better in the span of their short sets has me deeply excited to see what each of them accomplishes in the future. Palpable hunger in their eyes, the realisation of holy shit, I’m good at this; each of them clearly an emerging force to be reckoned with. Brown women truly can do it all. 

Brown Women Comedy ran from 6 to 21 April at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. You can check out Brown Women Comedy at the Sydney International Comedy Festival from 8 to 12 May.