Beyond the Lola Kutty frenzy, can the real Anu Menon stand up?

Anyone growing up in the early 2000s will remember Lola Kutty, the bespectacled, saree-clad character on Channel [V] sporting plaits with mullapoo in her hair, spewing Mallu-isms into our living rooms.

‘I am Lola Kutty. Out on a chutti. Oh, what a fun day. It’s a Sunday’, goes the famous Lola Kutty ditty. Sung in her trademark Malayali accent and bobbing of the head, it catapulted Anuradha Menon to near iconic status until the show ended in 2011.

It’s been eight years, and Lola Kutty is still not forgotten. Now that Anu is doing the standup circuit, the comparisons to Lola avatar are obvious. The obvious response to her first stand-up act on stage was, “Oh, you don’t look like Lola at all!”

Stand-up act

A conversation with Anu Menon is like a stand-up act - replete with quick wit, funny asides, brilliant repartees and of course, a huge dose of humour.

Her stand-up act does not stoop to being coarse nor is it dotted with cuss words. It is, instead, subtle humour on everyday incidents in life, including life with her mother-in-law.

“My stand-up act is doing pretty decent, as I perform before small groups. But the amount of emails I get on my mother-in-law videos on YouTube is amusing. They call me a modern, frustrated woman. My mother-in-law however is okay with it and watches all my shows. I buy her tickets to New York anyway ,” she says, and I like where the conversation is heading.

Which brings us to why there are very few female comics on the Indian stand-up scene. “I think they are getting there,” she says.

The world of female comics

“The basic difference between male and female comedians is that women are far more personal with their comedy. I think it’s generally how we are as a gender. I admire people who can make political jokes but mine are mostly sourced from daily life, and that’s what comedy is all about, right?”

But the attacks on female comics, Anu feels, is somewhat unjustified. How can they make off-colour jokes? How can they use cuss words on stage? But it’s okay for a man to do it. 

“I think we are at a phase where everyone, both women and men, are teetering on the verge of what to do, how to behave phase. I think men don’t know whether to open the door or not, pay the bill or not. They are equally deified and attacked. If this generation of men is collateral damage in what’s happening, I would say it took a long time in coming anyway,” Anu says.

In between her stand-up acts, she also kept herself busy with a show on ESPNcricinfo for the IPL, and also with Queens Vs Kings, an improv comedy battle on TLC. Besides these, she never strayed far away from her first love, theatre, from where this journey to superstardom began.

Living up to Lola

After eight years, is Lola Kutty still a tough act to live up to?

“Of course, the association still persists,” she says. “You know, people believed she was a real person, a living, breathing human being and till today, I think a lot of people don’t realise that I was acting. After a video of my stand-up act was released on YouTube, a woman wrote to me saying that she was very angry with me.”

She laughs as she recounts the episode.

“The lady said ‘you have shattered my entire childhood. We all love Lola and now you are now some outspoken well-dressed, articulate person, you have taken my childhood and dumped it in the garbage’. That was a bit dramatic.”

The birth of Lola Kutty

The events that led to the birth of Lola Kutty is nothing dramatic as the character herself.

Anu was born and raised in Chennai by parents who were doyens in the advertising business.

So everyone thought it was natural that Anu followed suit.

A quiet and shy child, she bloomed on stage at the age of 14. Her mother advised her that if she was interested in theatre she should go abroad.

She chose London for a Master’s in Drama, but the plan was to move back to Mumbai, the hub of the Indian entertainment industry.

“I thought I would land a television job that would fund my theatre habit because one cannot make a living out of theatre,” she says.

Anu made the rounds of different channels, meeting people.

“One guy was like, ‘you are different, you do theatre, you have an accent, you have the advantage of being a woman, you should just marry money, his place is not for you.’So I went, ‘Damn it, Abhishek Bachchan is already taken, what shall I do now? I now have to find a way to make it on my own.”

Meeting the head of Channel [V] was a turning point. She was asked to audition and then hang out with the team as a creative researcher.

“All the chatter around South Indians, and as we were called, Madrasis, and an atypical one at that, gave birth to the character of Lola Kutty. Channel [V] at that time had this hep and cool image and it was taking a great risk with the character. But it paid off,” she says.

Ms Cool and Quirky

So Lola Kutty became the antithesis of cool with her swagger, Mallu accent, and quirky, fun lines. Soon, she was interviewing celebrities, which made the show an even bigger hit. As Lola, Anu was the “common person’s representative” and she always remained in character. “The actors let their guard down, thought it would be cute to be flirty with Lola, they would carry me and twirl me around. And I reacted as the character. Everyone who came enjoyed themselves and attempted to be funny,” she adds.

So will Lola be resurrected? “My mother used to say, ‘Lola rocks, but Anu sucks’. She represented something for a whole generation. If we had to come up with Lola now, we would have to move to the web. I will come back, if Amazon gives me enough money to do it,” she quips.

So how will Lola be different then?

“I don’t think there would be much of a difference. But she would be more aware. We are in the midst of a social media explosion so I would say she would make references to Twitter and be a star on Instagram!”

As for the future, Anu says one never knows and it does not work to plan too far ahead. “I don’t know what offers will come my way or will be snatched away. I will have to face a certain level of rejection and not be affected by it. I have this whole other life, raising my son single-handedly as my husband is away at sea for half the year. At some level, I need to maintain an equilibrium and strike a balance,” she says.

At the moment, life is zimbly too good for Anu Menon. But we can’t wait for Lola Kutty to make her appearance again in a social media-dominated universe, with a little of the earlier TV charm for good measure.

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