Sindhu Vee: Swanky review, from the perils of parenting to the glories of self-pleasure

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

H ow 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.

But at its best, Vee’s over-it mum shtick (“if they ‘air’ you, gaslight them!”) has the ring of hard-won truth, such as the parental Zoom call into which she must, subliminally and strategically, interpolate life advice to a daughter who would never otherwise listen to it.

Such is the thrust of Swanky’s central section, and it is always diverting, with frequent lively digressions, including a droll one about the uniquely British deployment of the word “kindly”. Vee has an acute eye for this stuff, and I perked up when she belatedly returns to the cross-cultural theme. That feels like the show’s natural ending point, but she ekes out one anecdote too many, about a misunderstanding on a Hollywood film set, then appends a whole new section: a hymn to the glories of female masturbation no less. There is no denying it hits the audience’s G-spot, that one, even if it seems to come from another show entirely.