In her 2017 Netflix special Aditi Mittal: Things They Wouldn’t Let Me Say, the comedian turns personal experience into frank stand-up about sex, menstruation and the expectations placed on women. In a July 20, 2017 interview with Scroll, Mittal explained that the title’s “they” is not one identifiable censor: it points to a wider pressure around what people are allowed to say or wear.
What the special is about
Netflix describes Aditi Mittal: Things They Wouldn’t Let Me Say as topical stand-up, including frank material about being single, thongs and Indian movie ratings. Scroll’s interview focuses on the personal experiences behind the comedy, particularly Mittal’s jokes about sex and menstruation. The official Netflix India page lists the special as a 2017 stand-up comedy title; its listing does not guarantee that it is available in every territory. View the official Netflix India listing.
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Who are the “they” in her special’s title?
Mittal rejected the idea that the title refers to one named authority or organized group. In the Scroll interview, she said: “It is silly to act that there is a specific ‘they’ in the world we live in which has a problem with what we say or wear.” The title is less an accusation against a particular censor than a way of naming the diffuse social expectations that shape what people feel able to express.
Writing from her own life, not a category
Mittal also questioned the idea that women’s comedy is a separate genre. “Nobody tells male comedians that they are making male jokes,” she said, adding that “female comedy is not a genre anyway.” Her point was that the subject matter came from her own life, not from a requirement to represent all women. As she put it, “I can only tell you what it is to be like Aditi Mittal in Mumbai in 2017.”
#1 Best Overall
That perspective matters to the special’s frankness: sex and periods are not presented as a checklist of topics for a woman comic, but as experiences Mittal chose to make comic material. Her account also makes clear that saying those things onstage did not guarantee an easy reception.
What Mrs Lutchuke lets her say
One route into the material is Mrs Lutchuke, a sari-draped older Maharashtrian woman who appears for eight minutes, according to the interview. Mittal said she based the character on her Marathi teacher and her best friend’s grandmother, whom she called Ajji.
Rank #2
- Factory sealed DVD
The character gives Mittal a way to talk about sex through a persona that changes how an audience receives the subject. She explained that an older woman saying something about sex could seem less threatening to audiences than a young woman saying it directly. The disguise is not a retreat from the topic; it is a comic device that makes room for it.
When audiences pushed back
Scroll reports that Mittal was sometimes heckled over jokes about sex. Recalling one exchange after a joke about periods, she said a man in the audience shouted, “Excuse me. We don’t want to know about this”. Her response was: “Maybe you should know about it because a period is how life begins.” The moment captures the friction at the center of the material: a subject treated as unspeakable becomes the premise of the joke, and the heckle becomes part of the performance’s argument.
Rank #3
- DVD
- Multiple Formats, Color, Dolby
- English (Original Language), English (Unknown)
- 1
- 305
The 2017 moment around the special
The interview placed Mittal’s special in a conversation about women’s representation in Indian stand-up. Devarsi Ghosh reported that Amazon Prime Video had signed 14 comedians for hour-long specials that January, with no women among them, and that Mittal had been the only woman at a previous industry roundtable. Those details are the interview’s historical account, not an independently established measure of the industry as a whole.
Within that context, the special offered Mittal space to perform her own material. She told Scroll that Netflix’s Swati Shetty and producer-director Fazila Allana said they would not cannibalise her content and encouraged her to do what made her funny. Her description emphasizes creative control: the aim was not to soften the material into a supposedly universal or safer version, but to let her use the experiences and voice that were hers.
Quick Recap
Best Value
- DVD
- Multiple Formats, Closed-captioned, Color
- English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
- 1
- 105
Rank #4
- 4-Disc Special – 16 Comedians – 8 Hours of Stand Up Comedy + Bonus Videos
- Disc 1: Shayne Smith, Ali Sultan, Ricky Mokel, & Karen Morgan
- Disc 2: Jeff Allen, Monique Marvez, Mike E. Winfield, & Zoltan Kaszas
- Disc 3: Josh Blue, Karen Rontowski, Jeremy Alder, & J Bliss
- Disc 4: Brad Upton, Drew Thomas, Kellen Erskine, & Jose Sarduy
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