Warning: The article uses terms that are not intended for readers under the age of 18.
Stand-up culture is more or less new in Georgia, but the audience is growing every day. The number of comedians is also increasing, and today Georgian stand-up knows many women who have firmly established their place in the field dominated by men. They joke about everything, they joke boldly and they joke on different stages, including outside the borders of the country.
Niniko Lekishvili, Nata Talikishvili and Vero Melua are among them. They have to deal with the stereotype that women can’t joke well; experienced virtual attacks and hate speech when their boldness or identity was deemed unacceptable by certain groups. Nevertheless, they intend to continue doing standups and believe that the more women are interested in this field, the more stereotypes will be broken. Appropriate tribunes are also offered to those who wish.
Niniko
Niniko Lekishvili was 17 years old when she heard George Carlin’s stand-up, after which she fell in love with both George and this field. She remembers that she performed his first stand-up show with his classmates and friends while still at school. Years later, she appeared in front of the same people in Barcelona as a stand-up comedian. What was thought unimaginable at school age is a reality today – Niniko is one of the stars of the Georgian stand-up scene.
Before this field was established in Georgia, Niniko followed the scene of different countries of the world on the Internet. She remembers that there were mostly men in the shows, and in 2019, when she came to the Standoff Tbilisi show for the first time, she also saw a woman on stage.
“She had a very pleasant and very funny stand-up, and in two weeks, with her inspiration, I wrote my first stand-up, after which I had a speech at Stand-up Tbilisi”.
One stand-up followed another, and Niniko, along with others, enthusiastically hosted the people who came to the shows. She remembers that at first it was mostly the same people, but then the audience grew. Then she went to Great Britain to study, and after returning to Georgia, she was met with a big stage.
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“Now a lot of people are coming, we are filling up Amirani, which is a great progress and the result of hard work of standuppers”, says Niniko.
She came from the UK with a lot of experience herself – she first performed on Comedy Virgins, where she met other comedians, made friends who explained to her how she could perform in more places. She remembers that sometimes she appeared on several stages in one night. However, she considers the biggest success to be the participation in the national competition called So you think you are funny, where many new comedians take part.
“There were 400 people in the first qualifying round. I got through to the semi-finals and then I went to the Edinburgh Festival. If I was going from here, I could not have imagined it at all. I knew about this festival, I thought I would go as a spectator and it turned out that I went as a participant. I had several speeches and it was a wonderful experience”, Niniko tells us.
Today she performs on the stage of different countries, jokes in English and Georgian and jokes about everything that is important to her. She says that making others laugh, causing happiness and fun is probably the most important feeling that makes people do stand-up.
“The emotion that I experienced for the first time is unforgettable, and when you go to a large audience and suddenly hear 400 people laughing, there is no better feeling for me, as a person who loves to make friends or even strangers laugh. This is a very big part of my personality in general, and those who know me know that I am like that and in any sad situation, I try to cheer someone up and see life in a different way.”
“Sometimes a joke may not work, but you can use this moment for good. My jokes, which I now love and often make people laugh at, were created when a written joke didn’t work. Maybe you’re having an adrenaline rush where you really want to make the audience laugh at a joke you think is really good. Then you suddenly feel something, that you have to add something to it and bring it to the climax so that people laugh.”
Stand-up, she says, is an echo of whatever is affecting you at the moment, whether it’s a personal or public issue — “it could be the fact that you had a bad date, or your government is passing a law that’s against you.”
Therefore, as a hetero woman and as a citizen of Georgia, she makes fun of both men and the government and the social conditions in the country. She says: at first I thought Georgian men wouldn’t laugh at my jokes, but the guy I met on the street told me that he jokes well. Because many women’s experiences can be similar, Niniko expects the women to laugh at her jokes, but observes the men in the audience to see how they perceive this or that issue.
“For me, as a stand-up artist, self-irony is a very important part. No one can come up with a joke about me that I can’t come up with myself. Sometimes it’s hard for men to laugh at themselves, but in fact, many women find it very attractive when a man can laugh at himself,” says Niniko.
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Niniko can joke that she is displaced and that the state gives 45 GEL allowance to displaced people. During a stand-up performance, she asks the audience for advice on what to spend this money on. As she says, his primary goal at this time is not activism — ” My main goal is always to make the audience laugh, and then if they think about this joke at home, what should a person spend 45 GEL on, and develop a sense of empathy for the displaced, it will be very pleasant for me.” .
We asked if she faces stereotypes in this field and how open the stand-up scene is to women. She recounts her experience when a video of her speech went viral on Facebook and she received hateful comments not only for the joke, but also for her appearance. She also says that I think all women of color have experienced this situation, who published the video of the speech.
“I will never pay attention to something like that, because I think that if those jokes were told to a man, they would praise me and not insult me like they did to me. But somehow it doesn’t affect me anymore, I’m very confident in my values, my views and what I do. If I come up with a blo*job joke and I’m a woman, I can still make a joke about it. […] They wrote that I crossed the line. For them, the limit was that I was telling jokes of a sexual nature. That is not the limit for me. I don’t think that it is crossing the line for a woman to joke about porn.
She says that the more women there are in stand-up, the sooner the stereotype that women can’t joke well will be destroyed. It also emphasizes that everyone has different experiences, therefore different types of jokes, and the standupper likes the diversity of women very much. For those people who want to express their life in humor, she offers to keep an eye on the stand-up Tbilisi page, where open mic announcements are published. According to Niniko, it is a very friendly space and a very good place to test yourself.
Nata
“My comfort zone was to tell some stories in a funny way, even if they were very tragic. I could tell a very difficult story in a funny way the next day”, says Nata Talikishvili, who characterizes her speeches as: “bold, obscene and direct”.
She remembers, at one of the queer events, I was sitting at the entrance of “Darkroom” and was telling something, when I realized that about 100 people were listening. Among them was Giorgi Kikonishvili, who told him the next day that what he was doing is called stand-up and offered to write a project. That’s how Nata’s performances at Clara Bar began, which was followed by her invitation to various events.
“The first time I did it, I was very nervous. I was so worried that I don’t remember what happened. There were too many people. For several months I was very unhappy with myself, I wanted more. Journalists were calling me and I realized that something was happening to me, although I did not feel anything special. One was a common occurrence for me, but I realized that it was not artificial and many people liked it. I went out of my comfort zone — I’m very sociable, but I was always flirting with the elites, and then these elites started going to my speeches,” adds Nata with a laugh, adding that she was “very culturally” destroying them.
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Nata notes that her speeches are more about telling real stories in a funny way than stand-up. He jokes about everything and jokes boldly, naming names and surnames.
“Even those who were not present have written me, saying, why did you say my name and surname? I said, woman, you are my sister, so what”, she says with a laugh.
For those unfamiliar with the queer community, and trans people in particular, Nata’s stories can be shocking. She says that what I say is 99% true, it’s just that the form of delivery has changed. In an interview with the Aprili Media, Nata jokingly adds that we have such an interesting life for trans people in Georgia. Told with laughter, these stories show oppression by the state and society, expose the fakeness that can be behind the fight for “traditions” and reflect the difficult experiences of trans people, which Nata chose humor to deal with.
“When these things cost me, then I didn’t want to joke about it. It was quite difficult. Sex work has left me with two of the worst injuries that I will probably never get over. But then, after a while, it’s easy to joke. If you don’t joke, you can’t be in drama and trauma for the rest of your life. For example, I recently met a guy who told me after sex, good job, brother, what an *ss you have.
In this country, they call the banning of “LGBT propaganda” as if a Georgian man sucks a d*ck in chokha-akhalukhi, that’s okay, and if you’re a trans woman, it’s propaganda. If I have sex five times a year for money, I am a pervert, a b*tch, a propagandist, and if someone sucks 20 d*cks a day with a chokha-akhalukhi and a stick, it is apparently very okay. Because of this, I can’t wear a chokha. I can be a pervert and they can look after their holy families. It’s a personal experience – he has half an hour ago sucked me and my sister’s d*cks and then he preaches something in chokha-akhalukhi from the tribune.”
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As a child, while living in the village, she thought she was the only one, “different”, and those people who wanted to hide their black and dark life pointed a finger at him. However, she had grandparents there who protected her from this negativity. She says, after arriving in Tbilisi, I realized that unlike “Georgian, traditional families”, I was a truly traditional, truly Georgian woman in forced sex work.
“I preserved the sacred things that my grandmother and grandfather taught me, unlike the society that pointed the finger at me and chased me with a stool.”
She says that even talking about the hate law on the part of the government has already damaged the queer community, and when the authorities in democratic states care about their citizens, the Georgian Dream tries to manipulate the LGBTQ+ community and wants to disguise all the problems as elections.
“It affects all of us. Since childhood, I have been doing everything to establish myself in this world as a woman and make my career. The state had no services when I arrived as a minor and had to be in sex work. I did everything by myself and it is very difficult when the state takes away everything instead of helping. It is difficult for a large part of society to make sense of what is said and read, and it is very easy to make them believe that the main threat to this country is one trans woman, Nata Talikishvili, who is doing everything for a safe and equal environment, who takes care of homeless animals on the street, who suffers from violence”.
Vero
Vero tells us that once, a therapist asked her who she would be if he didn’t have complexes, to which she replied completely nonchalantly, a stand-up comedian. It was unexpected for her too, although she thinks she can make the most unfunny, awkward, painful, sad situations funny.
“Then I started to think, what prevents me from going out and joking. For all I know, all men do it… and I realized that this was the main fear, that society is generally tolerant and accepting of men’s jokes, that a man is much more easily judged as a good comedian than a woman, and also that I was afraid of being judged by male audiences. , they made fun of me…”
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She shared her worries and fears in one of the women’s groups and asked if anyone wanted to perform on stand-up. 12 women turned out to be such, and the first stand-up was planned, where only women would appear on stage and only women would be in the audience. A friend, Paata Shamugia, gave up the writers’ bar and even went himself.
“When we did this stand-up, we realized that we are objectively good, and we also realized that men should also be listeners, and that the power is not in who is sitting in the audience, but in who holds the microphone,” says Vero.
It doesn’t matter what you do—if a woman even slightly reaches out to a public space, claims, “Come on, I’ll stand in that space and see how it goes,” automatically sets a standard that you must be bad for that standard.
“You’re not good enough, but you realize right away that the same standard isn’t for men because it’s about the public spaces that are mostly dominated by men, especially humor. A woman’s joke is something that is absolutely not accepted. That is, if you make a political, feminist statement in the public space, it is even more acceptable, there is an expectation for that. “Hate” is coming, but it’s a different kind of “hate” – directed at ideology, and when you occupy a public space that “belongs” to men, “how dare” already comes there.
“Joke, women. Joke with your friends and joke with the microphone. If you can’t find a space, where to start, write to me and we will create that space for other women”.
One of her stand-ups was followed by a lot of aggression on the social network. She expected responses, but not on this scale. She says that she was ready in theory, but in practice it is not easy to endure. No one is ready for it until they try it. However, he also notes that after this experience, “there is no degree of ‘hate’ or abuse that I can break down.”
“I am very sorry that, for example, the stand-up on me being displaced didn’t get so famous. I know the reason very well – they couldn’t hate me for it, they couldn’t find a space. It was just that you, who did the other thing, how dare you talk about the displaced. I don’t want my stand-up to go down in history because I cursed men, I’m going to do it anyway. I want other topics to become popular and I try very hard to make a “mix” – they will be angry about it and will listen to it as well”, says Vero.
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After the women’s stand-up, Vero had many speeches, on different stages and with different audiences.
“Once you come out on stage, once you see women, girls, queers, displaced persons, the poor, how they have a space of joy over something that they might have cried about two days ago, after this feeling it is impossible to stop it.”
She says that all her jokes are activism, although he neither demands nor expects it from everyone. In Vero’s view, mandating activism is wrong — it’s such a personal sacrifice that you can’t impose on anyone, except that it can sometimes be damaging to attempt activism as a result of public pressure.
“However, I don’t think it’s a problem when we ask people with power and platforms to express their opinion. You, as a political being, must have an opinion about things. […] Our existence is political. Now that I am sitting here in the park and breathing, it is already political. Everything that each of us does, regardless of profession, is political. Therefore, “I am a sportsman, an actor and therefore I will be apolitical”, is simply a lie and impossible, but your existence may not be activist and that is normal. You can make your art in such a way that there is no activism in it, and this is normal”.
At the end of the interview, Vero says that she really wants women singers to fill the Pilarmonia and adds: “we will definitely fill it, I know for sure – when we survive as this country.”