Padma Lakshmi is known for many things — her modeling career, her work co-hosting Bravo’s “Top Chef,” her marriage to Salman Rushdie, her political activism — but her comedy-world savvy is not typically one of them.
That is, until this past August, when Lakshmi was irate about Louis CK’s return to the stage at the Comedy Cellar, less than a year after he admitted to masturbating in front of multiple women.
In response, Lakshmi, who recently wrote a New York Times column in September about being raped when she was 16, tweeted a list of nearly two dozen comedians, writing: “Some people off the top of my head who are funnier than Louis CK and haven’t harassed women.”
Lakshmi’s knowledge of the comedy scene took many by surprise, which, she says, is to be expected.
“I have to be really serious on [‘Top Chef,’]” she says. “There’s really not any room to show my real personality.”
But her tweets struck a chord with some in the comedy world, and now Lakshmi will show off her bawdy side on Wednesday at the Bell House in Gowanus. There, she’ll host a comedy show with a lineup featuring some of the names she shouted out, including Catherine Cohen and Ziwe Fumudoh. Proceeds will benefit the Movement Voter Project, an organization that works to further progressive causes and to increase voter turnout.
“I love comedy shows,” says Lakshmi, whose all-time favorite funny people include Leslie Jones, Samantha Bee and Ali Wong. Nearly a decade ago, Lakshmi studied improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade, but the 48-year-old says she’s never done stand-up and won’t attempt it on Wednesday night — nor on Nov. 4, when she’ll be a special guest at UCB’s popular improv show, ASSSSCAT, in Hell’s Kitchen.
“Hell no, I wouldn’t subject anyone to that,” she says of her improv skills. “I think I should have some humility and just let the professionals do their thing.”
Come December, she’ll be back in her on-screen element for Bravo’s 16th season of “Top Chef,” based in Kentucky.
“I am uniquely qualified to do my job because I am a bottomless pit,” she says, adding that the best food she ate in Lexington wasn’t typical Southern fare, but a Sri Lankan feast at the home of Samantha Fore — a friend of one of the show’s lighting guys — who runs a pop-up called Tuk Tuk Sri Lankan Bites.
But Lakshmi and the culinary world as a whole have also been chewing over some philosophical questions, too.
The past season of “Top Chef” faced criticism for its boys-club vibe among contestants. But Lakshmi says the show has always made gender quality a priority.
“We bend over backwards to cast an equal amount of males and females,” she says. “The show is ever-evolving … it’s like a marriage, you have a relationship with your TV audience.”
Lakshmi says she didn’t discuss the #MeToo movement with the show’s contestants, as she has little contact with them off-screen, but she has received a heartening response to her op-ed.
“I’ve gotten so many letters from both women and men,” she says. “Men are saying: ‘Hearing all of this stuff, I’m embarrassed to be a man and I just realize how clueless I was. I would hate to think that something like this would ever happen to my sister or to my mother, but if it had, I bet they wouldn’t tell me.’”
Source: Read Full Article