For years, comedian Amruta Bendre thought laughter followed her for the wrong reasons. It took a pandemic pause, a rightly-aligned Instagram algorithm, and a few stubborn joke prompts to nudge her toward comedy, which wasn’t even on her radar until her mid-30s.
With her original show Phulka Dots – all set to be performed tomorrow – Bendre stands firmly in a space few comics occupy, in the comedy ecosystem that rarely waits for mothers to catch up. She will take centre stage, armed with Bollywood parodies, domestic truths and of course a wicked sense of timing! “I didn’t know comedy was a profession until I was 34; it was out of the picture,” she shares.
A former music, theatre, and French teacher, Bendre quit teaching during the pandemic when online classes drained her enthusiasm. Later, a standup writing tutorial she watched casually led to joke-writing prompts that her brain – ‘this third-party character’ as she calls it – couldn’t ignore. Soon, jokes began popping up uninvited, and social media became her testing ground. “Strangers would tell me it’s funny. That was a discovery,” Bendre adds.
Slowly, open mics followed her, and so did clarity. As a self-confessed ‘plus-size woman’, she assumed people chuckled at her, not with her. “Besides being socially funny, I realised there are no moms on stage,” she shares, pointing out that while comedy has seen plenty of fathers narrating family life, mothers remain conspicuously absent. That gap became her calling and ‘Phulka’ Dots, named after her first joke that earned big laughs, blends standup with music – a format she initially resisted. Coming from Bengaluru’s ‘purist’ comedy scene, she was warned that singing on stage could be dismissed as gimmicky. “People say even Vir Das or Zakir Khan are hacks. So I thought, ‘if they’re getting flak, what will happen to a 40-year-old aunty who sings?” she says with a laugh.
The turning point came when her audience made their preference clear. After promoting a line-up show heavily, attendees stayed back, disappointed that she hadn’t sung. “I realised my audience likes me the way I am, and what I do. So I reworked my hour-long standup set, weaving in 12 parody songs. I failed once, and then I listened,” she reminisces. Her approach to parody is intuitive and meticulous. Unlike quick rhymes, she aligns her lyrics closely with the original songs. “Sometimes the song gives me the words, sometimes the emotion finds the song. I like to rhyme my parody with the original song. That’s what clicks,” Bendre explains.
Her show isn’t a quick-fix solution nor a self-help guide. “Life is a problem after problem after problem. My show won’t solve anything. But it will give you a break. Especially for women, I hope to offer two hours of laughter where they feel seen, heard and unburdened,” she says.
(Watch Phulka Dots, a Musical MoMedy on February 1, 6pm at Big Pitcher, Indiranagar. For more info, visit bookmyshow.com)