Reading Town Hall
The standup’s new tour covers cross-cultural identity, Hollywood mix-ups and exactly how honest to be about your children’s arts and crafts output
How British is Sindhu Vee? And how Indian? That’s what her new standup show Swanky addresses in a wonderfully self-possessed opening that sees her give account of herself to an old duffer at a party. It’s a subject well suited to Vee’s beady and sceptical style, as she drops a tart gag about India-Pakistan relations, or later interrogates the assumptions of a micro-aggressing mum at the school gate. One might wish the whole show were themed around this topic, but its larger part majors in the relatable if not always revelatory subject of parenting. And that’s before we even mention her tacked-on final section, on another matter entirely.
The parenting material dominates the show, and ranges from the generic to the specific. Specifically, Vee has a big age gap between her first two kids and her third, and many of the jokes are about how differently Child 3 has been raised – cue sardonic eye-rolling at the helicopter parenting of others, and of her own younger self. Sometimes this shades into over-familiarity (teens and their mobile phones), or cynicism, or both – as in the routine about the rubbishness of her kid’s arts and craft output.
