London-based performance artist, writer, comedian, and theatre maker Krishna Istha first became interested in stand-up comedy when they saw Zoë Coombs Marr and Hannah Gadsby perform live. Seeing them in action “changed my perspective of what stand-up was and who it is for” recalls Istha, who is part of a lineup of seven genderqueer comedians—including Jes Tom and Mx. Dahlia Belle—in Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda. The Netflix comedy special, curated and hosted by Gadsby, was filmed at London’s iconic Alexandra Palace last year.
Istha, who was a writer on the final season of Netflix’s hit series Sex Education, is currently working on a trilogy of performance pieces entitled M:Otherhood, exploring their journey to starting a family as a trans masculine person with a trans masculine partner. Part one, First Trimester, premiered at London’s Battersea Arts Centre in 2023 and was the subject of the documentary short film Sperm Donors Wanted! directed by Logan Rea. They have since taken the show to New Zealand and will be performing it in Copenhagen, Denmark on March 16th and 17th, 2024.
With Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda now streaming globally on Netflix, Krishna Istha speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about being involved in the special, discovering that they were funny early in life, and their favourite LGBTQ+ culture.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: when did you first realize that you had the ability to make people laugh and how that manifest itself?
Krishna Istha: “I was a bit of a weird child. I’d be dancing around and pulling faces and trying to get people to laugh at things that weren’t particularly funny. I’m very goofy. I guess ‘weird’ is not the right word, ‘goofy’ is a better word.”
“Actually, I remember the first ever joke that I wrote, which I only realized way later was a joke. I would say, ‘I’m allergic to all nuts, except which nut?’ Because I am actually allergic to nuts. People would go through all the different sorts of nuts that exist and then I’d be like, ‘Haha! It’s dough-nut! I can still remember being five or six years old doing that joke and people laughing. I hadn’t thought about that in years, so thank you!”
It’s still a good joke and it’s your own, not one that you got out of a cracker or anything.
“Oh, maybe I did?! I don’t know where I got it from, but I used it all the time.”
You’re involved in theatre and you’re a performance artist, so how did stand-up come about?
“I always made work that had comedy in it, but I’d never considered myself a comedian of any sort. I think that’s mainly because I didn’t see people like me doing stand-up. It wasn’t a thing that I thought I could do, but then I started working with a bunch of comedians—including Zoë Coombs Marr, who Hannah Gadsby often works with—and I realized that what I was doing was actually stand-up comedy. I fell into this world of queer comedians and the sort of work that they were making was interesting and exciting to me, so I found love for it from there.”
So you got to know Hannah before this Netflix special came about?
“Yeah, it was through Zoë. I was in a show called Wild Bore, that I also wrote a little bit of too, that Zoë and two other artists made. We did the show in Melbourne in 2017 and Hannah came to see it, which is when I first met them. Over the years our paths have crossed in the performance comedy worlds.”
Did seeing what Hannah was doing with their comedy influence or inspire you in any way?
“Yeah, absolutely. The first two comedy shows that I ever went to were Zoë Coombs Marr’s show and Hannah’s show, which is when I was like, ‘Hold on, this is a thing queer people do and there’s a queer audience for it?!’ I was definitely influenced by both of them and what they were doing. It was eye-opening because I didn’t know it was out there until that point.”
What was your reaction to being involved in Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda?
“Terrified, but also excited! I think my first reaction was, ‘Oh no, how am I going to do this?’ I’m not a gigging comedian, so I don’t do the clubs, but I have joke sets that I do in queer cabaret spaces and in a theatre context. I was a bit nervous about how some of my work would translate, but Hannah and their producer Jenney Shamash helped me to work out what parts of my work and my voice would translate to a stand-up scenario.”
“I’ve got this thing that I do with a dick microphone, where it’s a packer dildo but there’s a mic through it. I was like, ‘How do I get aspects of this other thing that I do into this very short, very pure stand-up set?’ We did play with doing it, but in the end we were like, actually, this is a different thing that I’m doing in this instance and I think it was a good call to cut it because there are things that work in different spaces.”
What was it like performing on this bill with seven genderqueer comedians?
“Really amazing, everyone was so nice and we really got on, which isn’t always a given when you get a group of people together, but everyone was so supportive of each other. We had a couple of warm-up gigs at the Soho Theatre and we bonded very quickly. There was a real sense of camaraderie. It was also incredible to see them doing what they do, which as a person who doesn’t do the comedy clubs, I think is really brave. This is such an amazing thing that they do and they’re so resilient. There’s a part of me which is not brave or headstrong enough to deal with some of the environments that comedy comes with.”
With performance art, is the environment set more by you as the performer with the particular work that you’re doing in contrast to a traditional stand-up club setting?
“They do overlap, but I think the audiences are different. In comedy clubs, often the expectation is a very specific thing, but over time it is changing, which is great. In performance art, all sorts of people have been making all sorts of work for a long time and the audiences are more niche. So it’s a very different ballgame really.”
Gender Agenda isn’t your first Netflix experience, because you were in the writers’ room on the final season of Sex Education, how was that experience?
“It was really great. There was a group of amazing writers—mostly queer, mostly people of colour—and there was a really great sense of community.”
Folks will be able to watch the documentary short film Sperm Donors Wanted! on the Still Watching Netflix YouTube account.
“That’s right. I basically work for Netflix at this point!”
When people watch it they’ll be able to get an insight into your recent show, First Trimester, which you did at the end of 2023 at Battersea Arts Center in London. How did the idea for the show come about and did you came away from it with any new insights or a different take on starting a family?
“The show came about because me and my partner are both trans and we wanted to have a baby. We were looking on lots of different sperm donor websites and very quickly we realized that, one, there was a real lack of sperm in a lot of places and, two, that all of the information that you get about the donors are things that we didn’t care about. It’s physical things like height and eye color, and weirdly whether people have PhDs or not! That was the main criteria.”
“As a passing comment, I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could speak to lots of people and really get to understand what sort of person they might be, because this person is, in some form, going to be part of our lives or our future child’s life. So it would make more sense to know that this person is nice and that they align with what we might want from life’. That passing comment is what became the show, where I sat on stage and every ten minutes a different person would sit across from me and I’d ask them a bunch of questions to try to work out what sort of person they might be.”
“What have I learned from it? Quite a lot. Every time I do this show, my mind changes as does my partner’s, on lots of different things. Sperm Donors Wanted! follows the run that we did in London, but we also went to New Zealand in February and we’re going to Copenhagen next. The context in which the show exists is so different in each place because the laws which surround queer people and trans people and your rights as a parent and your rights as a sperm donor differ from place to place. It’s wild trying to make sense of the show in that context, but also to make sense of what it means if we were to find a sperm donor in all these different places and depending on the sort of person they might be our rights as parents completely change.”
“The thing that I’ve really changed my mind about since doing the show is the idea of queer families and how there’s no one way. With queer people in general, we tend to think of family in such a broad way. It’s not necessarily defined by blood, or defined by the number of people, it’s actually defined by lots of other things, like our sense of community and love and all of that. Doing this show over time has reinforced that which is really nice.”
Lastly, what’s your favourite piece of LGBTQ+ culture, or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you?
“The things that popped into my head are the experimental performance artist Reza Abdoh, the band Bikini Kill, and Margaret Cho. They’re all part of me and things that I’ve grown up being influenced by.”
By James Kleinmann
Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda is now streaming globally on Netflix. Follow Krishna Istha on Instagram @krishnaistha and visit their official website.
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