Archana Puran Singh’s first television outing, Mr Ya Mrs, aired on Doordarshan in 1987 and turned out to be strangely prophetic. Directed by Jalal Agha, the show centred on a working woman married to a house husband, played by Jayant Kripalani. Just a year later, Archana met actor Parmeet Sethi, whom she married in 1992. In the early years of their marriage, while Parmeet was still trying to establish himself in the industry, Archana became the family’s primary breadwinner—much like the character she portrayed in the series.She also revealed that one of her real-life conditions before agreeing to marry Parmeet eventually found its way into his directorial debut, Badmaash Company, which hit theatres in 2010, nearly two decades after their wedding. The film starred Shahid Kapoor and Anushka Sharma in the lead.She said in an interview with Screen, “Parmeet wrote Badmaash Company. When Shahid proposed to Anushka, she gave the same line, ‘I’ll never enter the kitchen and no wet towels on the bed.’ That was my line,” reveals Archana. “I still don’t go into the kitchen,” she added, with her signature guffaw intact.Her refusal to cook has often been a recurring theme in the family vlogs she shares with Parmeet and their sons, Aaryamann and Ayushmaan Sethi.Although she is now widely regarded as one of television’s most recognisable comic faces, Archana recalled how difficult her first day of shooting comedy was while working on Mr Ya Mrs in 1987.“My first shot on my first day was to stir a kadhai. Jalal asked me to make it funny. Today, I can find a hundred ways to make it funny, like the back of my hand. That time, I had no clue,” she confesses.Trying to deliver the scene, she relied on exaggerated expressions, assuming that was what comedy demanded. However, director Jalal Agha quickly corrected her approach.“I made some faces because that’s what I assumed what comedy is. Jalal said, ‘Cut! Comedy is not about making faces, Archie!’ I felt so bad. He yelled at me. And whatever little I could manage to do, I couldn’t even do that anymore,” she recounts. “That sentence has stayed with me. I learnt comedy on the job. Every day on the set, I realized what makes something funny and unfunny. And I kept learning. But my first day was very bad,” she admits.Despite beginning her career with comic roles, Archana says such opportunities gradually disappeared after she became a permanent fixture on Kapil Sharma’s comedy shows, including Comedy Nights with Kapil, The Kapil Sharma Show, and more recently The Great Indian Kapil Show on Netflix India, where she now appears alongside Navjot Singh Sidhu. While audiences came to associate her with her infectious laughter and playful banter on the show, she found that film and television offers became scarce, even after memorable performances in successful films such as Rohit Shetty’s 2012 entertainer Bol Bachchan.This year, however, has marked a fresh chapter in her acting career. After impressing audiences as the unpredictable main antagonist in Rajkummar Rao and Sanya Malhotra’s black comedy thriller Toaster on Netflix India, Archana is set to return in a completely different avatar. She will next portray a domineering and manipulative government officer in Biswapati Sarkar’s campus comedy series Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya, which premieres on Prime Video India on July 24.