Aparna Nancherla on Eric Adams, Chat GPT, and the Gentrification of Yoga

Self-proclaimed “dark-humored” white male comedians aren’t cutting it anymore, but Aparna Nancherla is here to save us from their clutches. The D.C. native and L.A. transplant, who cut her teeth doing stand-up, eventually got her big break as a staff writer for Late Night with Seth Meyers, but the journey to success wasn’t nearly as funny as she is. In her deliciously self-deprecating memoir Unreliable Narrator, out today, the Bojack Horseman veteran takes us through her trials and tribulations, from regrettable girlhood crushes to being attacked by Taylor Swift stans. To learn more, we subjected her to the Rorschach Test, in which she sounds off on Chat GPT, unrequited love, stan Twitter, and Mayor Eric Adams.

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CHAT GPT

“I think I’m ready for ChatGPT to become so advanced that it develops self-loathing and a drinking problem as a writer. I want ChatGPT to have imposter syndrome.”

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WRITER’S ROOMS

“Closed for renovations. I’m hoping they come back in a more humane form.”

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IMPROV CLASS

“I am pro-improv class. I will say ‘Yes, and’ improv classes.”

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TRUMP’S MUGSHOT

“Overdue.”

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VOICE-ACTING

“My favorite part is no hair and makeup. “

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BOOK EDITORS

“I’m horrible at taking criticism. I need it, and I don’t accept it. So I feel like I need a book editor, and I also deeply resent that I have to have one.”

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INCEL SUBREDDIT

“More extensive than I hoped. It’s too deep.”

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DO NOT DISTURB

“Sometimes I wish I could wear a hotel do-not-disturb sign around my neck. When you’re out in public, there should be an option to just kind of be there and observe and not interact. If there was less of that, I think I would be out more.”

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ERIC ADAMS

“For some reason I just imagined a rat king.“

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COVER LETTERS

“They still give me nightmares. I haven’t worked an office job or a job where I need to write a cover letter in almost over a decade, and I feel like the best one I wrote would make me throw up. They’re kind of like auditions in Hollywood; you do a lot of them, but how many of these are actually being watched?“

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SENDING BACK YOUR FOOD

“I’m the person who orders a dish, and it comes completely wrong, and I’ll just be like, but what do I like about what they did here? I know my salad is actually a soup, but maybe I actually wanted soup and they knew that about me.”

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MODEL MINORITY MYTHS

“Time to pack it up. It’s so 2,000 and late.“

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UNREQUITED LOVE

“Stay around if you can use it to create content that you can then monetize. And once that dries up, keep it moving. Pop music would not exist without unrequited love.”

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GENTRIFIED YOGA

“I’m both a part of the solution and the problem, because I resent that yoga has become so gentrified, as an Indian person. But did I do countless yoga videos taught by white women over the pandemic? Yes, I did.”

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GRINDR

“It’s helping people connect in the ways they need to. Grindr will be the through line to the When Harry Met Sally reboot, When Harry Met Sammy.”

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STAN TWITTER

“I’m terrified of it. Being attacked by a bunch of bigots is still less scary to me than being attacked by a bunch of stans. When people’s hate is motivated by love, it somehow becomes that much more horrifying.”

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THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE

“Overrated. Self-help, to me, cannot be made into a listicle. I feel like the idea of a best self is sort of a false idol.”

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GIFTED KIDS

“There should be a title called re-gifted, and that’s where, later in life, you reclaim or disavow any labels. That was never me, and I resent that the system called me that.“

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