Rani Shah is not your average Indian girl. She’s had a unique passion for comedy since a young age. Recently, I had the delight of interviewing her about her successful website, Fuss Class, which is a website dedicated to satirical comedy for young Indian adults.

Rani is a 25-year-old working in Manhattan. She is a content marketing manager at a tech company and studied chemical engineering in her college years. I was intrigued as to what led her to make this website. She said she that in December of 2016, she had been “laid off and was at crossroads, freelancing for other companies.” She had just started writing comedy ideas at home during winter holidays. “I would write jokes about Indian culture, just about experiences we have as South Asians that only we can relate to, similar outlooks, our shared experiences.” She says her inspiration for her website is that she thought it would be “awesome if we had this one spot for humour comedy writing for Indian people.” So, she opened up a domain and published her first article on Christmas Eve. It quickly garnered attention and had blown up within a few months.

Over the course of the year, she submitted more articles, talked to more writers, and took satire classes. She says “there’s not that many of us (South Asians and women) in comedy writing yet.” She noted that in the recent years, there have been more Indian people doing stand up and being in films, which is good, but she’d like to see an increase in the writing aspect as well. Her website really blew up when people started submitting ideas to her. Rani wanted more experiences.

“I’m a straight Gujurati Indian woman from Illinois. I want more nuances, different walks of life, men, women, everyone in the South Asian diaspora.”

She is currently recruiting new writers, and her goal is revamping the social media content and channels. I asked her if she had any tips for young comedy writers.

“Don’t worry about your first draft being a piece of shit. It will 110% be. Everything is bad at first. The first time you run a mile, etc. But just keep writing because everyone has a different sense of humour, everyone has a different audience, so keep writing and show people. It’s scary, but it’s good to get improvement. Don’t be discouraged.”

She concluded with one of her favourite quotes: “Perfect is the enemy of the good.

Rani Shah is a groundbreaking young woman who has made a lot of strides for South Asians in comedy. You can check out her website here.