What better time to be a woman in comedy?

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Content warning: This piece has mentions of attempted suicide. 

The first time I talked to Abby Govindan, it was about Amber Heard. Abby was already a highly-followed comedian on Twitter, and I was a less-followed journalist. It was the halfway point of the U.S. defamation trial, and the internet was flooded with vile misogyny. 

I was still afraid to speak up at the time, but Abby tweeted about how there would be a documentary in 15 years unpacking the sexism against Heard, “all while doing the exact same thing to other victims of domestic violence… like clockwork.” I sent her a DM to commiserate about the harassment Heard’s defenders received, and Abby shared that other female comedians she knew were going viral by mocking Heard’s abuse allegations instead.

From the instant I met Abby, I knew her as someone who wasn’t afraid to speak the truth, even if it went against the current. Even if it put her at risk. 

It was also around the time Abby and I met that she was working on the material that would become How To Embarrass Your Immigrant Parents, the off-Broadway stand-up set she debuted to a packed house at the SoHo Playhouse on Wednesday night.

“A lot of people’s first hour isn’t a storytelling show, but I decided early on that my first hour would be a storytelling hour,” Abby told me over the phone earlier this week. “It’s the story of how I told my parents I wanted to be a stand-up comedian, how our relationship fell apart because of it, and how we built our relationship back up together after my brief stint in a mental hospital following a suicide attempt.” 

I’ve watched Abby do a truncated version of this hour-long routine on the Lower East Side, in venues with comedians stacked on top of each other. SoHo Playhouse is larger and more comfortable, adorned with posters from previous shows like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. Maybe you’ve heard of it. This version of How To Embarrass Your Immigrant Parents is brought to you by Hasan Minhaj. Maybe you’ve heard of him.

As a 27-year-old Indian woman making a full-time living from stand-up comedy, Abby is already peerless. Among full-time comedians her age, the field is mainly white men. Women of color in their twenties make up a tiny minority of career comedians.

For the other young women of color in Abby’s audience, who filled most of the front rows on Wednesday night, she speaks to shared experiences they don’t hear about in anyone else’s comedy. She attributes this as one reason why she sells so many tickets, but she also wants everyone in the room to have a good time regardless of their identity. Based on what I heard from the crowd, they did. The man in front of me nodded vigorously in agreement throughout the show. 

When she isn’t solo onstage, when Abby opens as the lone woman in a lineup of men, it can undercut her confidence. She has been mistaken for a fan when going backstage. Audiences don’t always react to her storytelling the way they do to men riffing. But when Abby has felt insecure in recent years, she tries to refocus the feeling.

“My self-hatred and self-doubt morphed into something else,” Abby said. “It morphed into hunger and a desire to be a better comedian.”

Abby used to tweet more, back when it was called that, and she still posts about politics on social media. She’s proudly pro-Palestine and speaks out against gender violence in India. She has endorsed candidates and raised thousands of dollars. These kinds of positions can lose people opportunities, paying and otherwise. But Abby actually believes in what she says. Contrary to popular belief, being principled can actually serve you well as a public figure.

“People tell me they appreciate how I refuse to back down on issues that are important to me,” she said. “That is so rare in the social media age, because everyone is worried about pissing off a streamer or even their friends they collab with. It’s easier to choose silence.”

But Abby wasn’t driven to go into comedy because of our current political climate. She isn’t doing this because of Donald Trump or anyone else. “I think that I was destined to be a stand-up comedian no matter what,” she said frankly. “It was pawing from the inside of me.”  

When Abby and I talked before a tech rehearsal for her SoHo Playhouse debut, our conversation returned to Heard. The same playbook is happening to actress Blake Lively. Abby and I both know firsthand that the misogyny and smear campaigns leveled against celebrity women trickle down to affect women who are less famous and who aren’t famous at all. 

These cases have changed Abby’s calculus around her own career trajectory. She has passed on auditions and refrained from posting more on social media out of fear that she will be next.

“I think that I would be the perfect and most delicious target for an online hate campaign,” Abby said. She could imagine what they’d say about her. She’s seen what they said about other South Asian women in the spotlight before her, like Mindy Kaling and Jameela Jamil.

After seeing how the contours of racism and misogyny play out in these campaigns, Abby has second-guessed how she acted with men in her audience and other male comedians. Last summer, Abby appeared in a dating comedy show. She said the hosts violated her boundaries they had agreed on beforehand and posted humiliating clips of her online. Abby has been open about the experience with other people in the industry, turning it into a joke about the dating show being a front for sex trafficking, and she worries about retaliation. 

“Even though I have this following and this show, I’m constantly reminded that it could all go away if I piss off the wrong man,” Abby said. “I constantly have to be measuring the emotions of the most volatile man in the room.” 

Abby foresees an inevitable catch-22. She wants her career to keep blooming, but if she reaches a certain level of fame, there will be an incentive for powerful men and random people on TikTok to seed narratives that she’s too shrill, too unlikeable, too mentally ill. The crux of How To Embarrass Your Immigrant Parents is about how online overexposure damaged Abby’s most precious relationships and preceded a suicide attempt. She’s still constantly weighing what her mental health can handle. 

But this week, Abby feels “perfect.” She is celebrating the most important show of her career, so far. That show made me laugh. It also made me tear up. Abby’s humor and heart remind me of Rachel Bloom, the comedian behind the cult comedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but for a generation of Twitter-addicted zoomers. During the show, Abby shares how a series of tweets falsely claiming she created the show Emily in Paris went viral. And some of the biggest laughs were in response to screenshots of emoji-laden texts from her dad. As the show neared its emotional climax, the crowd was enraptured. 

“I’m not trying to move everyone to sadness, but I wanted to connect with the audience so that they’re on the edge of their seat and they’re hanging onto every word,” Abby said. 

At a show in San Jose in February, she walked onstage to find people distracted by waiters who were still taking drink orders. It was a brutal beginning to the set. But once Abby got to the part of the story about her hospitalization, she noticed that the theater was “pin drop silent.” She heard someone shush their waiter. 

“I think that was the first time I was acutely aware that I held all the power in that room,” she said.

Abby has four more shows at the SoHo Playhouse this week, then she’s headed to Australia. She’s already working on her next show, and if anyone from Netflix is reading, her life goal is to do a comedy special with you. 

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