PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
{one - joke town}
Nancherla
has been one of the few promising young female comics in Washington in recent years, a regular at open mikes and well-known in the local come- dy scene. That’s in part because she’s a woman, as well as an ethnic minor- ity, and standup is an overwhelmingly white male pursuit. But beyond having a kind of first-glance uniqueness, she’s also getting noticed because she has shown talent. Mike Way, 30, another comic who has appeared frequently in shows with Nancherla, calls her “one of those people who I watch and think, ‘Gosh, I wish I’d thought of that.’ ” Curt Shackelford is a former stand-
up comic who organizes three open mikes around Washington every week. They aren’t entirely “open”; he choos- es the performers, and often includes Nancherla. “Most of the time she’s hys- terical,” he says. “There aren’t that many people that write better stuff than her.” For the past few years, Nancherla
has pushed herself to perform locally four or five nights a week — a jumble of small shows and open mikes — and until recently, each appearance came after a long, generally unfunny day in Alexandria editing and writing for a monthly trade magazine devoted to workplace training trends and issues. Many comedians who get started
in Washington and want to take their comedy career to the next level decide they have to move to New York or Los Angeles, the industry towns where stars are made. As a Washington standup, it’s easy to start feeling stuck and insecure, Nancherla explains, “when you do, like, seven shows in a row and there’s no au- dience [besides other comics] . . . and you’re just starting to doubt all your goals or something.” But comedians also say that a low-pressure comedy town such as Washington is a great place to learn, experiment and make mistakes before heading out. So Nancherla finds herself at a cross-
roads: She still has a lot to learn, she knows, but doesn’t want to grow stale here. Her boyfriend and fellow come- dian, Hampton Yount, 26, left for Los Angeles in April. He’s been crashing
in a friend’s apartment, doing odd jobs and performing in more shows as the weeks go by, including a contest at the high-profile Laugh Factory, where he impressed the management enough for them to promise him future slots. At first he seemed “a little bit shell-
shocked,” Nancherla says, but, “I think there’s probably just an adjustment period.” For now, though, she still has a set
at the Topaz’s open mike to finish. “I’ll leave you guys with this,” she says. “My mom doesn’t come to a lot of my shows — you’ve figured out why — but she’s like, ‘Oh, you’re going to do this whole comedy career thing?’ So she’s started heckling me in everyday life, like dur- ing routine tasks, and so far, it’s been a lot of booing and yelling, ‘I want my money back!’ ”
Nancherla’s small size and shyness — and until they were removed in Sep- tember, a set of braces — give her an almost childlike vulnerability. She ac- knowledges, “People tend to treat me younger than I am.” That image is ex- aggerated by how she dresses, which is usually in jeans and a sweatshirt or a baggy tunic-like shirt. And then there’s her bedroom. It’s the same room in her parents’ McLean house where she slept as a kid, with a single bed and a pile of stuffed animals. Next to her bed is a stack of notebooks filled with jokes in tiny, perfect print.
Nancherla often posts goofy com-
ments on her MySpace blog, or sends out stream-of-consciousness tweets, which she calls, “a way for comics to come up with one-liners.” (Aparna “does a lot of charity gigs as a comedian. Mostly for benefits of the doubt.”) One area of potential material that she
considers off-limits is her Indian back- ground and culture. She’s never joked about being Indian American, much less made it central to her comedy in the manner of Margaret Cho’s take on her
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