“We have a Wikipedia page! Can that be our headline?!” Interview with hosts of the Brown Girls Do It Too podcast

It was a remarkably warm afternoon in May when I set out to the Soho Theatre in Central London to meet Poppy Jay and Rubina Pabani, the creators and hosts of the groundbreaking, immensely popular and downright hilarious podcast, Brown Girls Do It Too, and now live show Brown Girls Do It Too: Mama Told Me Not To Come, at the Soho Theatre. If you haven’t heard the podcast yet, it’s about sex from the perspective of two British south Asian women; Poppy and Rubina. Yep, you read that right. It shouldn’t be so audacious but the mere fact it exists feels shocking, if not scandalous.

But Poppy and Rubina don’t mind: "Who knew that in the 21st century, sex is something to be really scared of, even though everyone watches porn and Indian people fuck - there's a billion of us. It's the one last bastion of society, one last taboo that we don't talk about, even though everyone's having sex, or wants to have sex. So we were both floored, by the response from men and women because we were like, ‘we're not doing anything cool or funny or whatever’. Like, who cares? We didn't care. But we were embarrassed by it so we didn't share it on social media because two respectable brown girls don't do a podcast about sex. Because that's trashy lowbrow. Right?”

Listening to it however, (and them during the interview), trashy is certainly not how it feels. One of their fans described it best when she said, “it's like a slumber party I was never invited to.” In fact, throughout the interview I found myself wishing I had the camaraderie and female friendship that Poppy and Rubina share. “We now look at it as one of our great loves. I think people listen because we're the best bromance.” Their natural bond, which often feels and sounds lifelong, was actually only formed during the podcast, when the two were bought together by a sharp eyed BBC producer. “But neither of us pitched it,” Poppy explains. “We wouldn't have. We wouldn't have pitched an idea about brown girls having sex. We were too snobby about that shit, you know? It was the idea of a brown man. He basically didn't know how his elderly mother - I think she was in her 70s - how she got together with his father, who I think passed away. And he was like, ‘where are the Millennial and Gen Z women talking about sex and relationships openly?’”

One day he came across another podcast Rubina used to do with a friend, in which they spoke about sex. “And then he puts together like the Spice Girls! Even he was surprised. Like the first series, he'd be behind the glass window and he'd have his headphones on and he would just be shocked that we were like that. The day that we told him that women watch porn, he didn't believe us. There's a real lesson in here: it doesn't have to be your story but if you see there's a story missing, and you can plot for someone to tell that story? That's an amazing thing to do,” Poppy says. The podcast is one that translates beautifully into a loud, rambunctious, silly and thought-provoking live show. It’s a mix of sketch comedy and improv. The improv is based on their podcast and they try and do something a little different each performance. The process of doing the show has also been eye opening for them - it has shown them the adrenaline rush that actors get but also if a certain segment doesn’t get the reaction they hope for, then how to just keep calm and carry on. Recognising how difficult it can be for some people to even attend the show, the women don’t record it so attendees can feel comfortable, safe and free to laugh, cheer and cry as loud as they would like.

Part of the podcast’s draw is that “it's quite unfiltered. It's just like real human beings making mistakes, being contradictory. Also when you can laugh about sex: because sex is this revered thing, right? It belongs to hot white people and not Asians, but when you can laugh about it and be silly about it, it just makes it really accessible.” In fact, except for their current partners and aspects of family life, there’s little the women won’t talk about. “If there's a really personal bit of like yourself that you keep hidden from your partner or from your parents, that's the sexual side of you. That's the kind of internal fantasising, seeing the kind of monologue you have in your head on the street. And what we do on the podcast, which even I find, like blows my mind that we can do, is just go from brain to mic. And we just experiment. We experiment with what it's like to be as brutally honest as you possibly can about the crazy shit that's going on in all of our brains.”

This appears to have rubbed off on viewers of their show, who queue up afterwards to see them and, finally feeling they have someone to open up to, talk, almost without pausing to breath, to share their stories. Poppy and Rubina love it though. “The women that we meet, they're vivacious, they're gregarious, they are fucking funny. Sometimes I think they should be doing the show.” You would be forgiven for thinking their audience was all young brown women. “I think we underestimated some of the aunties. We did a matinee performance in Birmingham and in the audience were aunties dressed in very traditional clothing and then I said to these two women ‘I hide from women like you’ and the auntie's were like, ‘we have sex too!’” As is often the case with Asian women, there is much presumed based on expectations. “They expect us to speak a certain way, to hold ourselves in certain way. Even when I met Poppy and she told me that she'd been through divorce, in my head, I had this preconceived notion of someone who's come up with divorce and how they would speak. And I was like, she doesn't shit. And that's so cool. And actually, that really rubbed off on me because I was like, yeah, you can be bold and be yourself and that's okay,” Rubina shares.

Women, and south Asian women in particular, are expected to have positive attributes all the time. Thinking back to her cousin, Rubina shares, “she was quieter. Her demeanour was very subdued. She listened. She was never loud. She never talked back. She never asked questions. All of these qualities we love in women, which is why I think these women when they came to see us, they see themselves in us, they see their stories in us.” Having come across Poppy and Rubina, lives have been changed. “One girl started a career in stand up comedy because of us, a guy rimmed his partner after hearing us talking about rimming and she loved it. And then there's the person who had never masturbated before, and listened to the podcast and was like you guys kept going on about how much you enjoy it and I just thought, I've got to give it a go. And she now she loves it. Some men who are married to Asian women feel more connected to their partners after coming to see the show and understanding them a bit more.”

Still, translating the podcast to a live show, which they co-wrote themselves, wasn’t easy. The ladies call themselves “amateur performers” and confess that a lot of the sketches are based on real life. “It's almost like unlocking something that we didn't know we had in us because podcasting is [very different]. This podcast is very sex related but the show is so much more than that. It encompasses identity, growing up in a white country, talking about our role models, social media, body dysmorphia and our mums. It's us baring our souls.” Rubina shares that after the first season of the podcast, she struggled with dealing with the hate she received on social media and says that her and Poppy have become fiercely protective of each other since, and indeed much of the show is a deeply intimate and powerful look at the words trolls have tried, but failed, to pierce the women with.

Yet despite this, the pair mostly feel gratitude. “Imagine we hadn't been given this. How many brown women are in jobs where they've got all this unfulfilled potential but they don't get those opportunities. We're lucky. We are a hit. You know why? Because of our struggle. Like some of the funniest women I know have been through the hardest, hardest times. And you have to use dark humour, which is often what we do. We use dark humour to get through things because if you can't laugh about it, you're gonna cry, and we cry anyway. So you might as well laugh while you're at it. And we do.” But they also make you think and reflect and if you’re a brown woman, then nod along viciously. Poppy and Rubina are also two of the kindest people you’ll meet and it was a privilege to spend the hour interviewing them as they made me forget my problems and feel welcome and included in their safe space.

Even though we all know the necessity of comedy, it’s easy for people to forget that their work carries great importance. “It's interesting, because it's like this idea of radicalism. Radical means so many different things in different countries; you look at what's happening in Afghanistan, you look at what's happening in Iran. Women in Iran are dancing and are radical just existing. In series one, neither of us knew what was happening but just us talking about it is this radical thing. It's all relative to where you are and your experiences, but the fact that that many people are scared and this many people are trolling us means that we still need to fucking keep doing it.” Rubina says: “I've been making stuff since since I was 10. If you're creative, you hope it has some sort of ripple in the ether. And this is the one thing that I feel didn't have a ripple effect on people. It had a fucking seismic shock earthquake moment for some people. But it's still a very, very funny, silly, upbeat, energetic show. We're mostly trying to be clowns. We really just want to make people laugh.”

And laugh indeed they do. When I attended the press night premiere for the show last week, it was the most I remember laughing at a stage production since seeing The Play that Goes Wrong, in 2019. So go on, what are you waiting for? Tickets can be bought here. And you can catch the podcast on all audio streaming platforms.