Brown Women Comedy

A comedy line-up with no white men? Can it be true?! Free from the swinging of colonial dicks, Brown Women Comedy is a space where bad-ass brown women tell the kind of jokes that Australians rarely get to hear – and they totally kill it.    

In fact, during their first visit to Sydney, Brown Women Comedy was obliged to add an extra matinee to their five-day run, with every other show sold out. On opening night, producer Daizy Maan, who is also our effortlessly hilarious host, quipped that ‘racial profiling’ (read: handing out flyers to people who looked like her) had proven a very effective marketing strategy. Still, while the show deliberately and joyfully serves a South Asian audience, these women are also simply just funny, no matter what kind of lunch your mum packed you for school – making for a fun, status-quo-kicking night out for anyone.  

Along with Maan, the Sydney line-up featured Kripa Krithivasan (podcast host of Uncultured), Guneet Kaur (a RAW Comedy National Finalist), Chanika Desilva, Kru Harale, and Monica Kumar. Each brings their own unique brand of comedy – for instance, Kaur is dry and self-effacing, with lines like the one about how she’s only interested in a threesome as “a means of getting a second opinion”; and Krithivasan is wickedly funny, accusing white culture of “colonising therapy”. There’s a lot of great material about topics like growing up with South Asian parents, interracial relationships, and how ‘CALD’ is a term used only by “Susans from HR”.

I can’t wait to see some of these comics featuring in the mix on other big festival line-ups, but in the meantime, it is a beautiful thing to see them conquer the stage together, in front of an audience that champions them. And while I myself am as white as a troglobite (seriously, my Polish and Irish blood have rendered me almost translucent), I am so here for the role model taboo-breakers of Brown Women Comedy, and the ticket sales show that a huge swathe of Australia is too. 

Brown Women Comedy toured to Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in early 2024. In August, they’re taking on the Edinburgh Fringe. Check out where they’ll be next at brownwomencomedy.com.