Alok Menon is not interested in easy laughter. In Alok’s Hairy Situation, the writer, poet and comedian uses body hair as a deceptively simple entry point into conversations about gender, power and belonging. As the show comes to town, they reflect on the ethics of laughter, performing across cultures and why comedy can make space for truths that resist singular narratives — where recognition matters more than approval.
Why did you choose body hair as material for this show?
Because body hair sits at the intersection of the personal and the political in a way that’s almost suspiciously perfect. It’s intimate, ordinary and obsessively managed. Everyone has it, but almost everyone has been taught to negotiate it quietly. As material, it looks small. But the moment you pay attention, it opens onto questions of gender, race, discipline and desire. Power doesn’t announce itself loudly here. It shows up in the bathroom mirror. Comedy is especially good at working at that scale. It can take something we’re told is ‘trivial’ and reveal how much meaning it has been carrying all along.
Body hair is familiar enough to lower defences and charged enough to sustain a longer conversation. People arrive laughing, then realise they have complicated feelings about razors.
What surprised you most when you first brought explicitly trans and non-binary experiences into stand-up rooms?
What struck me was how quickly people leaned in once the room realised it wasn’t being tested. Comedy audiences don’t arrive to agree or disagree. They arrive to be present. When trans and non-binary experiences enter that space, something shifts. The material isn’t being debated; it’s being felt. I also learned that humour can disarm defensiveness faster than explanation ever could. Once people are laughing, they’re already participating. The body gets there before the argument does.
That doesn’t mean the room is always comfortable. But comfort was never the goal. What surprised me was how willing audiences were to stay with discomfort when they felt invited rather than instructed
You’ve spoken about how mockery often precedes violence against trans people. How do you think about the ethics of laughter while performing comedy?
I think carefully about the direction of laughter. Mockery tends to move downward. It reinforces hierarchy a n d rehearses cruelty. Historically, that kind of laughter has often been a prelude to violence. The laughter I’m interested in works differently. It doesn’t ask the audience to laugh at someone, but at a shared recognition of absurdity, vulnerability, or contradiction. Ethically, that means paying attention to where a joke lands and who is being asked to carry its weight.
Performing in India places your work in conversation with caste, respectability and tradition in ways that differ from the west. What changes for you here?
What shifts is my awareness of how deeply ideas of respectability are structured and how much labour goes into maintaining them. That isn’t unique to India, but the hierarchies here are more explicitly named and historically sedimented. Performing here sharpens my attention to how bodies are read. Gender, caste, class and comportment are already doing work in the room before a word is spoken. That awareness doesn’t change what I say so much as how carefully I listen.
Tradition here doesn’t feel static to me. It feels contested, negotiated, alive. The work becomes less about provocation and more about relation. In that context, I’m conscious of being in dialogue with histories that long predate me.
Within queer and trans communities themselves, there can still be hierarchies around passing, and visibility. How do you see comedy challenging those internal norms?
I think comedy is especially useful inside our own communities because it can interrupt hierarchy without pretending it doesn’t exist. Passing, visibility, legibility. These pressures don’t disappear just because a space is queer or trans. They often reorganize themselves.
Comedy allows those norms to be named sideways. Not through accusation, but through exaggeration and play. When something becomes laughable, it becomes less absolute.
I’m interested in humour that makes room for bodies and expressions thatdon’t resolve neatly. That don’t aspire to coherence or respectability. Comedy can challenge the idea that visibility is a ladder, or that legitimacy is something you earn by looking the right way.
In India, gender expression is often framed as either “ancient tradition” or “Western influence.” Where do you see your work sitting within that binary, if at all?
I don’t experience my work as sitting comfortably on either side of that binary. The idea that gender expression is either ancient or imported has always felt more like a cultural argument than a lived reality.
Gender variance has existed everywhere for as long as people have. What changes are the names, the permissions, and the conditions under which it’s allowed to be visible.
My work isn’t interested in proving lineage or legitimacy. It’s interested in presence. In what it feels like to inhabit a body and a self right now, in this moment, with all of its inheritances and interruptions. If anything, the work tries to move laterally. Away from questions of origin and toward questions of relation. How we recognize each other across time, culture, and difference.
The public space here is highly gendered: who can take up space, who is watched. How does that inform the way your body is seen on Indian stages versus elsewhere?
In many Western contexts, gender variance is still treated as something abstract or theoretical, as though it’s new or rare. There’s often a pretense that it doesn’t really exist, or only exists at the margins.
In India, I feel a different kind of recognition. People know what they’re looking at. There’s a cultural frame of reference, even if it isn’t always generous. That recognition changes the encounter.
At the same time, there are very specific ideas about where a body like mine is supposed to belong, how it should appear, and what kinds of space it’s allowed to occupy. Those expectations can be quite narrow.
Onstage, I’m interested in playing with that tension. Not by explaining myself, but by expanding the frame. By showing up in ways that gently exceed the categories people arrive with, and letting humour do the work of stretching them.
Within queer and trans communities themselves, there can still be hierarchies around passing, and visibility. How do you see comedy challenging those internal norms?
I think comedy is especially useful inside our own communities because it can interrupt hierarchy without pretending it doesn’t exist. Passing, visibility, legibility. These pressures don’t disappear just because a space is queer or trans. They often reorganize themselves.
Comedy allows those norms to be named sideways. Not through accusation, but through exaggeration and play. When something becomes laughable, it becomes less absolute.
I’m interested in humor that makes room for bodies and expressions that don’t resolve neatly. That don’t aspire to coherence or respectability. Comedy can challenge the idea that visibility is a ladder, or that legitimacy is something you earn by looking the right way.
Your work resists being positioned as representative of all queer or trans people. What do you think gets lost when audiences look for a single “narrative” to stand in for an entire community?
When audiences look for a single narrative, what gets lost is texture. Communities aren’t stories, they’re ecosystems. A singular narrative tends to flatten difference and turn lived experience into a template. It quietly replaces curiosity with familiarity. Once you think you “know the story,” you stop listening.
For queer and trans communities especially, that impulse is often tied to comfort. A single, legible narrative is easier to absorb, easier to celebrate, and easier to contain. What falls away are the contradictions, the disagreements, the idiosyncrasies. The parts that don’t cohere. But those are often where life actually is.
My work isn’t trying to stand in for a community. It’s trying to stay specific enough to be honest.
When mainstream platforms celebrate queerness but avoid its politics, how can artistes keep the conversation truthful?
Mainstream visibility is often welcomed only when it remains pleasant, affirming and largely apolitical. Artistes and comedians don’t counter that by becoming louder or more didactic, but by staying specific — by refusing to sand down what is inconvenient, unresolved or uncomfortable.
Comedy, in particular, can smuggle politics back in through tone, timing and implication. A joke can carry critique without announcing itself. The work stays truthful by continuing to ask questions that don’t resolve neatly, even when a platform would prefer a simpler story.
A lot of queer discourse in Indian cities happens in English. When your work travels here, how do you think about accessibility and exclusion?
I’m very aware that English opens some doors while closing others. In Indian cities especially, it carries histories of class, education, and access that can’t be ignored.
When my work travels here, I don’t assume universality. I think about who the language invites in, and who it leaves at the threshold. That awareness doesn’t disappear just because the room is full.
At the same time, I’m attentive to the ways meaning moves beyond words. Tone, gesture, rhythm, physicality. Those elements can create moments of recognition even when language itself is partial.
Rather than resolving the tension, I try to stay honest about it. Accessibility isn’t a box you check. It’s an ongoing negotiation, and one I’m still learning how to hold.
Visibility can be both empowering and dangerous. What boundaries have you had to build as your audience and reach have grown?
As visibility grows, I’ve had to get more intentional about where I let myself be available. Not everything needs to be shared, and not every space deserves access to me.
Some boundaries are practical. How often I tour. How much I’m online. When I’m reachable. Others are quieter, internal ones. Learning when to disengage, when not to explain, when to let misunderstanding stand.
Visibility can create the illusion of intimacy. People feel close to you because they’ve seen you. That closeness isn’t always reciprocal, and it took time to learn that I don’t have to meet every projection with openness.
The goal isn’t withdrawal. It’s sustainability. Staying visible only in ways that allow me to remain a person, not just a presence.
After touring this show across different countries, which reactions have been the most revealing—not the loudest, but the most telling?
The most revealing reactions are rarely the loud ones. They’re the pauses. The moments where laughter catches, or arrives a beat late, or turns into something more reflective. Sometimes it’s an audience member who comes up afterward and says very little, but with a sense that something shifted. Other times it’s a room that grows unusually still around a particular line. That kind of attention tells me the work is landing somewhere deeper than approval.
Across countries, those moments tend to appear where the material brushes up against something lived but rarely articulated. Not outrage, not applause, just recognition.
Those reactions stay with me longer than the biggest laughs. They suggest that the work didn’t just entertain the room, it asked it to sit with something true.