The Eating of a Satiric Bug with Pratima Mani
The NYC-based comedian-filmmaker writer is making things both weird and poignant.
Pratima Mani is a comedian, a filmmaker, and an immigrant. Born in India, raised in the Middle East, she currently lives in New York City, where she writes for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I got a chance to work with her a few years ago, when I produced a live stand-up comedy show in support of the WGA strike,1 and thought she was a cool person. Like my wife, she moved halfway around the world and tore shit up when she got there. From my perspective, here on this couch in Philadelphia—about fifteen miles from where I was born—that’s pretty impressive. She’s somebody who is already doing cool things, and seems on her way to doing a lot more.
I bring up her immigration status for a reason. She’s producing a short film—which she also wrote—about her experiences navigating our fucked up naturalization process. The absurd hoops we make people jump through for the privilege of living here and keeping our economy humming.2 I would have been sympathetic to its themes regardless, but in Bug she styles the experience as something out of a Kafka story.3 I’ll let her explain…
My wife and I have been sponsoring the immigration of a family of Afghan refugees currently sheltering in Islamabad, and if you’ve been following the news, you can probably guess how well that’s been going. So, I’m very open to any sort of discourse on the subject that doesn’t make me cry.
She let me read the screenplay, and it didn’t make me cry once. She let me watch her first film, Stitched, and it was excellent.4 She mentions Yorgos Lanthimos as an inspiration, and it’s pretty apparent in the way she makes very dark satire almost bubbly in tone. How unimportant realities are simply brushed aside to make way for the piece’s weird nugget of truth. It’s a subtlety of tone and storytelling that’s hard to point at directly when done right. But it’s plainly obvious when done wrong. She doesn’t do it wrong.5
Mani is about three-quarters of the way toward securing the money she needs to make the film. If you feel like helping to push her team closer toward the finish line, you can pitch in right here.
I asked to answer some questions for me, partially as an excuse to watch/read her stuff, but also because I’m super nosy…
DDC: Where are you currently in the naturalization process?
PM: I currently just have my green card. I won’t be able to apply for naturalization for another few years and will have to take a call on it at that time.
DDC: Was there any incident in particular that inspired this film?
PM: For sure when I first applied for a green card (after 10 years living in the country) and learned that AFTER I got approved it was another 12 year wait for people born in India to get the card. That felt pretty surreal.
DDC: Both screenplays display a fantastically light touch with regards to absurdity, which is very difficult! Do you put a lot of effort into identifying that slight line between reality and ridiculous (which is not the same place in either screenplay)? Or does flow out like instinct?
PM: I think about it insofar as I like to start with a heightened premise and then write all the characters living in that premise as real as possible. People who are sincerely emotionally truthful in a nuts situation are very funny to me. It comes a little more naturally to me to write this way because it's essentially just a big emotional mapping exercise, which is something one gets very used to when doing sketch comedy.
DDC: Who are your stylistic and tonal influences? For these films and in general? In whose lineage do you consider yourself as an artist?
PM: I came up more through TV than movies but I'm a huge fan of things directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Armando Iannucci and Will Sharpe. I like comedies that don't shy away from darkness or strangeness. There's also shows like "Mo" and "Man like Mobeen" which straddle these two spheres very impressively. It makes them honest in a satisfying way. I try to keep that balance in mind when writing scripts.
DDC: How do you build a story? Do you begin with the weird thing (reanimating corpses, eating bugs) and then work to place it in a real-feeling world? Or do you play with the situation and allow the absurdity to emerge?
PM: I usually have the key premise in my head (often the weird thing) and then I'll build out the act-by-act structure and character arc from there. The real-ness comes when writing the dialogue and moment-by-moment reactions of the characters. Of course, there are discoveries while writing, and little additional moments of strangeness (or sincerity) crop up. Because my experience is in comedy, there's always pressure to write a lot of hard, punchline jokes and it usually takes a few re-writes for me to let go of that.
DDC: Do you have a target ambition for your career? Are you working toward a goal or making what feels right when you can do it?
PM: I think the latter. I like not being attached to one medium. Some ideas work better as film, some as pilot scripts, some as standup. I've been working on a short story for some time. It's nice to feel like you don't have to shoehorn everything into one format.
Here’s the trailer for her first film, Stitch, written by her and directed by Lorena Lourenco….
And here she is tech-wizarding on The Late Show…
And here’s a picture of a bug on a plate that I stole from her Seed & Spark page because I wanted it for this post’s primary image…
She was great! It was a superfun night, and it nearly gave me a heart attack!
If you’ve ever followed me on social media, you know what a loudmouth I am about immigrant’s right. I’m nearly fanatical in the belief that this country is only as strong as it is because it’s built on a foundation of multiculturalism. If you take that away, what even is the point of us? American “culture” only goes back a few hundred years. That’s nothing. Certainly not enough depth to maintain our status as one of the cultural epicenters of world. A status we only achieved due to our wealth of cultural diversity.
I spent half a year rewriting The Metamorphosis into an unsellable YA novella, so this is very in my wheelhouse.
It’s still on the film festival circuit, or I’d embed it here. Maybe later.
Which doesn’t surprise me. She was hired by Stephen Colbert, a guy who has intricacy of tone on lockdown.