How a comedy show became a conversation with our community
Artist Perspective for the 2026 Toronto Sketchfest: Alia Ceniza Rasul, Tita Jokes
When we first started performing Tita Jokes, we thought we were just making a comedy show.
Tita Jokes is a sketch comedy show created and performed by the Tita Collective, an all-Filipina group made up of myself, AP Bautista, Belinda Corpuz, Ellie Posadas and Maricris Rivera. It’s about a show about aunties, family life, and the strange, loving chaos of the diaspora: family parties, gossip, the food, the judgment disguised as care, and the care disguised as judgment.
We thought we were writing jokes.
At most, we knew we were writing a love letter to our community. At minimum, we were proving that you could have more than one Filipina on stage at a time, and the show would be fire.
What we didn’t realize at the time was that we were building something else too. We were building a room that felt like home. Not just for us, but for the people sitting in the audience. And it took years of performing the show to understand that.
The first thing those years taught us is that the joke is never just the joke. What people laugh at depends on where they are, who they’re sitting beside, and what they carried into the theatre that night. A line that explodes in Toronto lands differently in Vancouver. A Manila reference might pass quietly in one room and spark instant recognition in another. Same joke. Different lives behind it.
Over time, we stopped trying to make the show land the same way everywhere. Instead, we learned to listen. To pay attention to the room. Comedy stopped being just about performing and became about reading the community sitting in front of you.
Performing Tita Jokes also taught us something about representation.
At first the excitement was simple: seeing Filipina life on stage. Hearing audiences laugh at things that felt deeply familiar: family dynamics, diaspora quirks, the particular way love and criticism can live in the same sentence in a Filipino household.
But eventually we realized something else. For some people in the audience, this might be the first time they had ever seen their lives reflected on a stage like this. And suddenly the jokes carried more weight.
Even representation stopped feeling like a novelty and started feeling like a responsibility.
We began asking harder questions. When is exaggeration funny, and when does it flatten something real? When should a stereotype be pushed for comedy, and when should complexity stay intact? What about accents?
Because Filipina life is never just one thing. It’s contradictory, layered, messy, loving, exhausting, generous, and sometimes absurd. And the show had to hold all of that.
One of the biggest surprises was how much the audience shaped the show. Over time, they became collaborators. Their laughter edited scenes. Their silence rewrote beats. Moments we thought were small became the emotional center of a sketch. Stories people shared after the show changed how we carried those characters the next night.
The sketches shifted. Lines moved. Timing stretched or tightened.
The show became a living organism.
We also learned something about cultural specificity. At first we worried some jokes might be too inside. Too Filipino. Too niche.
But touring revealed the opposite truth: specificity works best when it’s rooted in emotion. Inside jokes don’t always travel. Feelings do. Shame travels. Pride travels. The complicated love between mothers and daughters travels. The strange balancing act of belonging to two places at once.
When a joke carried that emotional truth underneath it, audiences understood, even if they didn’t catch every reference.
Looking back, that may have been the biggest lesson the show taught us. We thought we were writing jokes about Filipina life. What we were really learning was how that life lives differently in every room.
Performing Tita Jokes also changed how we think about timing. Early on, there’s a temptation to stack punchline on punchline, to keep the energy high and the laughs constant.
But over time we learned it’s just as important to let the room breathe. To give people space to laugh fully. To trust the quiet moments instead of rushing past them.
Sometimes the most powerful moment in the show isn’t a punchline at all. It’s the pause that follows it.
Behind the scenes, we learned something else: the ensemble is the real star. No show survives years of touring without the people who carry it together. You learn how to support each other when someone’s energy is low. You learn how to repair quickly when tensions rise. You learn that the spotlight moves and different performers shine on different nights. What matters is that the sisterhood holds. So you also learn when the show can’t go on.
As the years passed, the show changed because we changed. What felt daring when we first wrote it sometimes felt smaller later on. Other moments deepened with time.
Looking back, we realized something we never planned.
Tita Jokes had quietly become an archive. The sketches captured how Filipina language shifts between generations. They held small details of everyday life that rarely make it into official histories: the jokes told at family parties, the rules of respect inside Filipino households, the particular way love and criticism often arrive in the same sentence.
We thought we were just making comedy but we were also documenting a generation of Filipinas becoming Titas out loud.
And finally, performing Tita Jokes taught us that laughter isn’t the only metric that matters.
Of course we love the laughs. They’re the signal that something landed.
But the moments we remember most often happen after the show. Someone waiting in the lobby to say thank you. An auntie recognizing herself in a character and telling us her story. A younger Filipina saying, “I didn’t know we were allowed to joke about that.”
Somewhere along the way, we accidentally made a gathering place: a space where Filipina life could be loud, ridiculous, complicated, loving, and unapologetically itself.
The show became a home. Not just for us, but for everyone who walked through the door, laughed with us, and shared a piece of their story.
And we’re grateful to everyone who stepped inside.
Maraming salamat po.
Tita Jokes by Tita Collective is on stage Thursday, March 12, 2026 at The Theatre Centre, part of the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival. Tickets are available at tosketchfest.com.
© Alia Ceniza Rasul, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
