Canadian-Tamil comedian Sunthar V navigates queerness and Tamil identity

Sunthar V doesn’t expect to be everybody’s comedian. But he is keen that you hear him out.

The 34-year-old queer Canadian-Tamil comedian, who founded the sellout show Tamil Comedy Club in central London in 2021, attempted to push social boundaries with his queer comedy while on a brief trip to Chennai.

Sunthar was raised in a working-class family in Scarborough, Toronto, and now lives in London, where he is looking at a full-time gig in comedy after leaving a job in marketing. He got on stage for his first standup performance four years ago before venturing out to find audiences in the United States, Europe and now India.

When he landed in Chennai in December 2022, he was here to share his own story as a queer Canadian-Tamil comedian. He met men who taught him that the queer experience wasn’t all “black or white” and challenged his Western perspective on queerness. By the end of his visit, he said, the Tamil LGBTQI+ community in India had filled him with a new level of empathy and understanding.

“I met queer folks who live double lives,” Sunthar told me. “It is not wrong. This Western perspective that ‘being on the down low, living a secret life’ means you are a bad person. No, you are not! You are surviving.”

These were men who worked hard and cared for their families. “It is the complexity in which they have to operate. It is how they live their lives and how society is set up. Having a bit of empathy towards that was important to me,” he said.

To Sunthar, comedy is a vehicle to reconcile activism, art and authenticity. “How do you navigate all three and stay true?”

While in India, Sunthar used his time to push boundaries with his sometimes sexually explicit comedy. He also, obviously, went on dates.

Soon after he touched down at Chennai airport, he opened Grindr, a dating app for LGBTQI+ communities, and the jokes wrote themselves. “I opened the app, and I got: “Hey bro, place irukka bro, pics irukka bro …” he chuckled during a set he performed in the city. Do you have a place? Do you have pictures?  

Sunthar came out to his mother when he was 30 years old, and soon afterwards started performing comedy. “I did my first set for mostly friends and family. My parents haven’t seen my comedy. I have been very cautious about it,” he said. “I am fine with the public space I occupy, but I am aware of the burden on my parents once it enters mainstream Tamil spaces. I am still figuring out how to navigate that.”

His parents know he does comedy discussing his sexuality and queerness onstage, “but they don’t know how explicit it is.” In his show, fellow women comics also use comedy as a platform to speak about their experiences – to live for those moments on stage, a momentarily honest life without their parents listening.

Performing in Chennai with him was a lineup of three young college-going women comics – Shakthi Shanmitha, Mownicaa Mani and Praveshika Kumar – and one male comic, Guru Narayan. It was an unusual lineup for Chennai standards, where the comedy scene is dominated by cis-heterosexual male comics with lucrative streaming specials.

Sunthar explained the lineup this way: “I have learnt a lot from female comics, from other queer comics and marginalised folks, and through their art I can consume their messages and reflect on it as opposed to high-level academic conversations.”

He thinks comics like him who have a platform should create these opportunities for themselves and others. “That’s the reason I am in Chennai, I have started to grow a platform and audience here, and I hope that will develop into something more fruitful, where I can own my own story and talk about my experiences and be able to share the art form in a way that feels more representative.”

“Do you understand my Tamil?”

When Sunthar came to India from the “chief coloniser land of the UK” with his “Yalpanam Tamizh” – the Tamil dialect of the Jaffna Peninsula in Sri Lanka, where he has ancestral roots – he came mainly for a chill time. “Seeing Tamil signages here felt familiar,” he said.

“I went on a temple tour in Tamil Nadu with my brother, who joined me for two weeks, and then I thought, let me do some shows here,” he explained. Sunthar ended up performing across Chennai, Bengaluru and Mumbai.

“I met queer folks who live double lives,” Sunthar told me. “It is not wrong. This Western perspective that ‘being on the down low, living a secret life’ means you are a bad person. No, you are not! You are surviving.”

Sunthar wanted to experience the comedy scene in Chennai, the headquarters of mainstream Tamil standup, with comedians like Aravind Subramanian, Praveen Kumar and Alexander Babu. Kollywood had paved the way for generations of iconic comedians, including his favourite actor and comedian, Vivek.

“The fascination with Chennai is in two parts,” Sunthar said. First, “I would love for more stories from the West to be showcased and told here, especially by people like me raised in Tamil diaspora communities abroad.” Second, there is “this innate curiosity from both these worlds, in the West and East, and a whole level of misconceptions about queerness within the Tamil community that needs to be addressed.”

In this southern Indian city, Sunthar was surprised to find he didn’t have to set a context for his jokes or explain his comedic choices, even though his Tamil dialect was distinct.

“I haven’t had to explain jokes to Tamil people here any more than I would have to explain it anywhere else,” he said. “There is a curiosity about my experience as a diaspora Eelam Tamil. I was surprised to see our many similarities regarding our thought process, culture, upbringing, struggles and interactions with our families.”

At his show, Sunthar was dressed in a grey shirt and a crisp veshti and danced seductively to a song from the widely popular Tamil film Padayappa, emulating the starring actor Rajinikanth as he climbed onto the stage. “That’s all the dancing you will see tonight,” he quipped, grinning as he tilted his head towards the mic.

An audience member yelled out, “I love your dirty reels on Insta.” This was a reference to Sunthar’s ‘translation videos’, where he takes Tamil song lyrics and translates their hidden sexual innuendo into English. His translation video of the song “Kaatrae En Vaasal Vandhai” from the 2000 film Rhythm has raked up a million views. “Are you one of those who wrote: ‘You have ruined my childhood?’” he asked the audience member. “No! You have made my adulthood!” she retorted happily.

He was thrilled to see that his jokes landed. “I have been doing the same jokes in Toronto, New York, London and now in Chennai, and I think: Wow, there is something here, there is some sort of thread that connects us all, and that’s the Tamil language,” he said. “There are so many nuances and shared experiences that we can focus on and use to grow and not lose out on the beauty of what it means to be Tamil.”

In this southern Indian city, Sunthar was surprised to find he didn’t have to set a context for his jokes or explain his comedic choices, even though his Tamil dialect was distinct.

On a Sunday afternoon, I went to the comedy show “En Tamizh Vilangudha?”, or “Do you understand my Tamil?”, which Sunthar headlined.

“Nan kadhaikardhu ungalukku vilangudha?” he asked – Are you able to understand me? “In my last show, someone replied with an ‘om,’ and I think they were making fun of me. They weren’t Eelam Tamil,” he joked. The word for “yes” in Jaffna Tamil is “om” whereas in Chennai it is “amam”.

Doing comedy in Tamil is a conscious decision for Sunthar. Growing up in Scarborough, there were many Tamil students in his school; at least 15 to 30 percent of his classmates were Tamil, by his estimate, since Scarborough had a high density of diaspora Tamils.

“Tamil culture has always been adjacent to how I grew up, and, especially for my parents, there was a lot of guilt for having fled our homeland and losing out on the language and culture,” he said. “That guilt drove my parents to force us to learn Tamil. I hated it then, but I am thankful now that I can read, write and speak it. I make mistakes and read slowly, but still, I am better than many people.”

Not just a joke

In his experience of cracking jokes in the West, Sunthar noticed that Asian comedy often caters to a white audience and involved comics poking fun at themselves, playing into stereotypes of their communities.

“I never wanted to be that comic! I make fun of situations where I date white men or my life as a Tamil person in predominantly white spaces. That is ‘punch up’ comedy,” he said. “It also fed into this idea that to make money you have to do English comedy, but that takes away from the fun of Tamil comedy and the progress I can make within the community.”

“Take the 1998 romantic Tamil romantic-comedy film Jeans, for instance,” he said. “If I say Jeans is my favourite film or jump into a Tamil song, a non-Tamil audience will wonder what that is. I don’t have to translate when communicating with Tamils because if you do, it is no longer funny.”

During a show in Chennai, Sunthar recounted: “I went over to this guy’s house just to meet him, and I am an empathetic person, so I said, ‘Is your wife at home?’” – he switched into Jaffna Tamil to deliver the question. “It’s a slow burner, I know,” he added, laughing. The audience laughed with him. Then he was told: “Hey bro, you speak just like Thenali” – a reference to a character played by the Tamil actor Kamal Haasan in the 2000 film Thenali, where he portrays an Eelam Tamil refugee who comes to Chennai for psychiatric treatment. “As a comedian, as a film lover, what do I have to do? I have to jump into character,” Sunthar said. The audience laughed harder as he began to imitate Kamal’s character.

In his experience of cracking jokes in the West, Sunthar noticed that Asian comedy often caters to a white audience and involved comics poking fun at themselves, playing into stereotypes of their communities.

Sunthar said he felt the Tamil film industry, popularly known as Kollywood, and Indian cinema in general, has given short shrift to Eelam Tamils. “The depictions aren’t accurate, the accent isn’t accurate, the casting is never our people telling our stories, and the people who benefit from it are also not our people. I know I am not Sri Lankan, but I have always felt like we have been done a disservice with people telling our stories,” he said.

Of course, Sunthar knows he can only explain some things through his comedy. “But I want to be able to shed some light on what my life is like and what kind of challenges I face. Comedy is a great vehicle to talk about serious topics: my queerness, Tamil identity and Eelam Tamil politics.” And Sunthar wants to express all that in Tamil.

When asked what his politics was, Sunthar commented only on his identity: “Let’s say I think identity is a strong enough statement, but I don’t identify with the [Sri Lankan] state due to its history of violence and oppression of Tamils.”

Driven by the need to have more critical conversations in two languages, Sunthar set up the Tamil Comedy Club in central London as a space for Tamil LGBTQI+ comics.

“The challenge I faced was context and language. Doing open mics at predominantly white clubs with English comedians was limiting how my mind works in both languages,” he said. “I want to create such a space in central London because all the Tamil stuff usually happens in the suburbs. It felt important to me to take up space in a location that traditionally didn’t host Tamil comedy.”

He gathered other Tamil comics, put out a call for women and queer comics, and announced the collective’s first show for November 2021.

“I will never forget that first show. We sold out! The room was packed, hot, and we were convinced everyone would get Covid,” he said. “It was amazing!”

The Tamil Comedy Club is now a monthly event in London, he said, as he is preparing to write an hour-long show that he can go on tour with to reach a wider Tamil diaspora audience across Europe, North America and Australia.

Four years into his life as a comic, Sunthar said he is worried about not being authentic. “How can I be authentic if I can’t talk about sexuality, love, life, my troubles?” To Sunthar, comedy is a vehicle to reconcile activism, art and authenticity. “How do you navigate all three and stay true?”

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