Comedian Aparna Nancherla has performed stand-up specials on HBO, Comedy Central, and Netflix; acted on Bojack Horseman and Master of None; and worked as a staff writer on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Despite the impressive resume, she experiences self-doubt, sees herself as a fake, and nearly quit comedy. Her new memoir is Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself and Impostor Syndrome.
Nancherla tells KCRW that in writing the book, she tried to absolve herself of that self-doubt. But instead, she learned it indiscriminately affects everyone, especially those in their early careers. “Then some of us lucky few are just wrestling it interminably, and it almost gets worse the more experienced you get because you feel even less deserving of your success.”
When Nancherla started performing in Washington D.C., she felt like her audiences tried sizing her up and figuring out who and what she was. So she addressed that weariness by saying, “‘Okay, I get it, I might not be your idea of what a comedian is. But let's just name it and move on from there.’”
She also notes that in comedy, failure isn’t always personal. “Just by virtue of self-preservation, I think you have to remember it's not always about you. Sometimes the show is a bad setup, sometimes, for whatever reason, you're just not clicking with the audience or they're not clicking with you.”
Nancherla actually points out that sometimes it’s easier for her to connect with strangers in the audience than a few people at a party, and she’s had to walk the line between achieving success but not attracting too much attention.
“You get to a certain standard that you hold yourself to, but then you suddenly feel other people's eyes on you, like either scrutinizing you or judging you. And then you want to hide again, so you find ways to diminish it and disqualify yourself from being there. And then the process just repeats endlessly.”
Today, she feels less social pressure and judgment, chalking it up to experience and a changing paradigm in the industry. “I don't bother with that anymore. And it could also be a testament to just the time we were in. Some of the old gatekeeping with comedy has been done away with because of the access to content that now exists on the internet, and the variety of creators who you're able to get it from.”
Aparna Nancherla’s new memoir is “Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself and Impostor Syndrome.” Credit: Viking Books.
Nancherla writes in Unreliable Narrator that she grew up quietly. Her mom — a doctor who immigrated to the U.S. from India in the late 1970s with Nancherla’s dad, also a physician — was so alarmed by her reluctance to speak publicly that she forced her to order pizza by phone, and even enrolled her in public speaking classes.
However, Nancherla embraces that quietness, arguing that introverts are natural observers and can find power in silence.
“I'm someone who is constantly observing everything that's going on around me. And I think sometimes that's harder if you're the center of attention in a room versus the person on the sidelines, taking everything in and watching people and seeing how they behave. Just being that sponge of human experience I think can be very good for stand-up because you are maybe seeing things or naming things that are there, but other people aren't paying attention to as closely.”
What regularly comes up in Nancherla’s acts are her struggles with anxiety and depression. Initially, she says it was liberating to share her experiences on the comedy stage. But soon, unease around performing crept up. “My act started to conflate with the experience of [anxiety and depression] in my day-to-day life in that I was like, ‘Why am I having so much anxiety about performing when I'm supposedly helping people by talking about my anxiety on stage?’”
Her anxiety got so bad that Nancherla canceled a tour. But she says the experience helped reframe her emotions. “[It] made me learn how to separate the two, or at least learn they're very different things. Performing them is still a little bit more removed, and there's a precision and a distance to framing it as a joke versus the lived experience of it.”