The New Yorker Publishes Piece by Broti Gupta ‘16 in Online Humor Column, Shouts and Murmurs
Broti Gupta '16 recently hopped off a plane at L.A.X with a dream and a cardigan (we assume, because, after all, it tends to be cold on planes). There she will be pursuing a writing career. "My dream would be to write for television. I write comedy, so either sitcom or Fox News would be great," she said.
Gupta is off to a good start. In late May, the New Yorker published a piece of her work in their daily humor column Shouts and Murmurs. Ordering Lunch for the Office: A Greek Tragedy navigates the perils of placing a group lunch order, chorus and all.
Gupta came to Wellesley intending to major in pre-med, but decided to switch to English the summer after her first year. "The amount of support I got from professors and my peers alike was indescribable. I knew from then on that I wanted to write comedy, and my professors would offer to read the writing that I did on my own and continuously encourage me to keep at it, even though it's a hard field to get into."
She added, "The English department, also, is so strong that I felt like my comedy writing was getting better the more I was writing in general – I think that strong foundation was so, so important for me to have in order to write better timed jokes, more succinct pieces and overall better framed comedy." As an example, she added that she never would have known the form of a tragic play without her English classes.
This past year, Gupta helped to organize a Working Writers' Series. One disscussion featured Kate Erickson '05 and Langan Kingsley '08. Erickson is a writer for the AMC series Fear the Walking Dead and Kingsley is a performer at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York; both women were English majors and members of Dead Serious. Another discussion, “Writing funny for a living,” featured Rachna Fruchbom '99, who currently writes for ABC's Fresh Off the Boat and previously wrote for NBC's Parks and Recreation.
While she's looking for a job Gupta said she plans to continue to freelance for places like the New Yorker and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She has also had work appear in Above Average, CollegeHumor, Funny or Die, Reductress, and Medium. She will be living with fellow comedienne Katie Barsotti '15.
In the weeks since her graduation, Gupta says she has "eaten two party sized bags of Ruffles," "watched the movie Spotlight twice before realizing it was the same movie," and "spent a record of 12 hours asleep in one night." She added, "The move to LA needed to happen."