Review: "Desi SNL" Delivers Dynamite Diasporic Comedy

Desi SNL

Written by Azhar Bande-Ali

Directed and produced by Azhar-Bande Ali, Shreya Thakur, and Sandalina Sattar, presented with FRIGID New York at wild project

195 E 3rd St, Manhattan, NYC

April 3-18, 2026

The cast and crew of Desi SNL. Photo courtesy of Sandalina Sattar. 
While Saturday Night Live, currently in its fifty-first season, has gotten (a bit) more diverse over the decades, it has still never, to our knowledge, had a regular South Asian cast member. Luckily, with an entirely South Asian ensemble cast, Desi SNL is more than ready to remedy this lack. Across a mix of stand-up, sketches, and satire modeled on its television namesake, Desi SNL is consistently hilarious, and a number of its comedic targets, such as pushy parents or group-chat-addicted relatives, work simultaneously in universal and culturally specific dimensions. Desi SNL is currently part of the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival, an open lottery-based theater festival in which one hundred percent of box office proceeds go directly to the artists, and which this year runs from April 1-19 at UNDER St. Marks, wild project, Chain Theatre, and The Rat NYC.
Azhar Bande-Ali. Photo courtesy of Sandalina Sattar. 
In this second "episode" (the first having been staged in November 2025), Desi SNL's cold open offers a fake installment of an actual interview show hosted by cast member and co-producer Sandalina Sattar, Spotlight with Sandalina, with Second Lady Usha Vance (Shivani Shah) as her guest, facilitating some sharply funny mockery of Vance's marriage to a Christian white supremacist. Lead writer and director Azhar-Bande Ali takes on the host role, delivering the show's opening monologue–including a story about dating a white woman that takes its time setting up a great, unexpected payoff–and closing words with drolly understated charisma. He also serves as a stellar Weekend Update anchor, the rapid-fire topical punchlines sprinkled with Desi pop cultural touchpoints. Between are sketches that take on topics including AI chatbots (which turn out not to be what they seem), pressures on women to marry, and pre-nup agreements. One sketch riffs hilariously on Key and Peele's anger translator bits, and another, with Shivam Seth and Himanshu Gautam as ICE agents looking for an excuse to arrest a trio of women (Meghan Mehta, Sophia Dhanani, and Baani Kaur) working in a grocery store, ends up in some joyful dancing to the song "Desi Girl" (and, with much more comedy than uplift, to "Ice Ice Baby"). There are pretaped pieces as well: a perfectly executed parodic backstage segment and a couple of dating show interview segments that offer up a variety of hysterically unsuitable candidates (one of which will make Mindy Kaling fans happy).

Amplifying voices that are underrepresented in US media with well-honed humor and a talented cast, the current production of Desi SNL will both furnish you with a wildly entertaining trip to the theater and whet your appetite for episode three.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

More reviews from the 2026 NYC Fringe Festival:

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