Ladies Up review: Netflix’s all-women stand-up special is undercooked, a missed opportunity

Ladies Up review: Netflix launched a new comedy special on Friday headlined by Prashasti Singh, Supriya Joshi, Niveditha Prakasam and Kaneez Surkha.

The world could really use a good laugh right now but sadly, Netflix missed that train by a mile. The streaming giant’s latest desi stand-up special, Ladies Up, could have been a breath of fresh air in the gloomy, virus-infested times we live in. However, all it got from me was a sad little snort of indifference.

Prashasti Singh, Supriya Joshi, Niveditha Prakasam and Kaneez Surkha in Ladies Up.

Ladies Up, as the title suggests, is a collection of four 15-minutes pieces by Comicstaan alumni Prashasti Singh, and Supriya Joshi, Queen of Comedy Niveditha Prakasam and the more veteran player among the lot, Kaneez Surkha. In their respective sets, they talk about casual sex, weird sex, kinky sex and, surprisingly, a few other things as well. While Prashasti is still talking about her PG-13 Tinder misadventures, Kaneez takes the discomfort up a notch with jokes about orgasms and childbirth, foreplay and breastfeeding, often in the same breath. While all sets were largely unimpressive, these two still had their moments.

Prashasti opens her set with an awkward proclamation about her age. “I am 32,” she says, expecting a reaction. But aside from a confused chuckle, no one seems to care. Maybe, by this time, she should have gotten a hint that people who comprise her audience don’t consider 30 some sort of Rubicon, or to apply coronavirus related parlance -- a ‘Lakshman rekha’. Sure, the set gets meatier with more relatable stories about her mother’s innocent Facebook posts but soon dives into boredom as she talks about the dating scene.

Towards the end, she recites an episode from a date that didn’t go as planned. She brings her date home, he is sitting on her bed, clad in nothing but a yellow towel, making bedroom eyes at her. In that moment she realises that she doesn’t want it anymore. She is confused about how to approach him and ask him to leave, a situation that reminded me so much of that popular The New Yorker short story, Catperson. The story and Prashasti’s set had real potential in that moment; it could have ended as something more than a shallow piece about dating in Mumbai. Prashasti even tries to land it on an empowering note, but the desired effect is never reached. The end doesn’t fit in with what is essentially a trivial set and seems like a forced paste job rather than a puzzle piece falling into place.

Kaneez’s set was more streamlined to her life as a divorcee and the desire to become a mother. She begins with stories about her life in Africa, her grandmother’s unhappy marriage, her own dreaded wedding day, the perks of getting divorced, and searching for men to give her a baby. On the surface level, the anecdote did bring in the laughs but at the core, these were still quite sad situations. Kaneez did a passable job of mixing the two together. However, her jokes about imagining her dates as nursing babies were the most uncomfortable to sit through.

Supriya Joshi, too, tried to root her set in more serious discussions.She talks about wanting to kill herself when her boyfriend left her and how she gave up the idea for a more empowered one. But the execution seemed hollow and uninspired from the get go. She did score a couple of laughs for juvenile jokes about flavoured condoms and I am not willing to dole out points for those.

Niveditha Prakasam stayed with her girl-next-door persona with her set, which landed as an episode of Ted Talk. Niveditha delivered an essay on Tamil men, their obsession with ‘white girls’ and the role of Tamil films in all of it. It all made for an interesting listen but failed to wriggle out even a single laugh from me.

Netflix had a good idea and good time to launch this tiny series. Sadly, we will have to find our much-needed daily dose of laughter elsewhere.

Follow @htshowbiz for more