Comedian Sanjay Manaktala shares with ANANYA BORGOHAIN the various nuances that go behind being humorous

Popular comedian Sanjay Manaktala was born in New York and he grew up in California. Having studied Computer Science, he forayed into the IT sector and subsequently to stand-up comedy. Soon, he moved to Bangalore and worked as a manager for Accenture. In the meanwhile, he also started English stand-up comedy in Bangalore at a time when there was no other comedian in the city. Today, as stand-up comedy in India grows immensely popular among urban masses, Manaktala recounts his journey that contributed towards moulding the funny Indian bone.

What were you doing before you moved to IndiaIJ

I moved to Bangalore in 2010. Until then, I was doing IT project management consulting and was working for banks. As I got better in that line of work, I was asked to come to India and to manage Bank of America in India was my role with Accenture.

Did you turn to stand-up comedy thenIJ

When I was a kid, in the US there was a popular gimmick for which we all kids got into trouble. A company claimed to sell 10 CDs for one dollar. We thought that was a perfect deal and called the number to place the order. But what they didn’t tell us was that in order to avail the offer, we must buy a CD every month for 25 dollars for the next 10 months. I wasn’t more than 10 at that time. Not realising the scam, I signed up for it and got CDs of Green Day, Michael Jackson, Billy Joel etc delivered home. I couldn’t think of 10 names so for the last few, I picked comedians Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld’s CDs. Now, I had 10 CDs and somehow, I didn’t listen to any of them except Chris Rock’s which, in the first place, I didn’t even want to buy! I listened to it and it was amazing how he made people laugh. So it got stuck in my head that stand-up comedy was a fascinating arena to explore. Then in 2004, Russell Peters became a household name and I thought, ‘Oh! Indians can do this tooIJ I thought they can only be doctors, engineers and other office people!’

The first time I actually tried stand-up comedy was in 2009 in the US. As a consultant, one gets to travel a lot. I travelled across the smaller towns of the US and didn’t have many friends there. Social media had just started and people were not yet frequent in communicating through it. So when you are young and bored, after working at a cubicle from 8 am to 7 pm, you need an outlet to channelise your creative energies. So, during one of my travels, I discovered pubs where stand-up comedy acts were organised. So I started attending them and gradually started to try it out myself. With time and practice, I got a grip of it and resumed it when I moved to Bangalore.

Why is it important for you to make people laughIJ

The reason I started to do it in pubs and bars in Bangalore was because I was getting bored and for me it was a great way to meet people. In my third show when I got some laughs, I was keen on doing it with renewed vigour. I believe we need our audience more than they need us. For instance, with music, I can play an instrument, practise it, tune it well and finally perform in front of an audience. With acting too, one can rehearse. But with live stand-up comedy, if you don’t have an audience, you cannot practise. If I share a joke with someone and they don’t laugh, I wouldn’t know if it was good or bad. With comedy, what’s funny is very subjective. Here the talent is not obvious.

Why is the city so conducive for stand-up comedyIJ

When I had moved to Bangalore, literally the 20 people on my Facebook friend list  Sorabh Pant, Vipul Goyal, Rajneesh Kapoor, Tanmay Bhat etc — were comedians of India from all over. We used to struggle to get comedians to perform. I urged them to perform, to take it seriously, come to open mics etc.

Bangalore has a culture that makes it conducive for us. The culture I instilled was very American. In lA, even if there are five audience members at a café, there will be 50 comedians waiting to perform. In Bangalore, when I started, it was just me. But people in the city were mostly English thinking; that was convenient. Then two other comics — Sandeep Rao and Praveen Kumar — joined in. A while later, the younger lot, such as Biswa Kalyan Rath, Kenny Sebastian, and Kanan Gill came and today the stand-up scene is much vibrant.

As a humourist, you may be required to be more observant than others. What triggers an idea in youIJ

We are lucky to have our computer, phone, tape recorder, note pad. So if something funny strikes me, I register it somewhere. First step is to observe. You look at any object and wonder what could be funny about it. Generally, ‘funny’ is an element of surprise. I mean, if you know a joke already, you wouldn’t find it funny. I used to have big notebooks to write 10 minutes of jokes.

And then it depends on the way you say it; phrasing the words with references, rhetoric, word play. Things keep happening, we just need to scrutinise and remember them. For example, the other day I was trying to sleep with my socks on and realised that had my mother been at home, she would have pulled them off. So I wrote a joke about how Indian mothers will wake you up just to get your socks off. Basically, they make you uncomfortable so that you’re comfortable! Also, if I write a joke in January, I try to get it on YouTube by June so that it does not get dated.

It also goes beyond being funny. Some of the funniest people I know are not comics. There’s nothing funny about the funny business. It’s hard work. I had 30 shows in February which had 29 days. One can see the amount of money that flows in with such arrangements, but a lot is invested in every act. A pilot flies you in two hours from Delhi to Mumbai but it’s his whole career in play there. I remember this one time when I performed in Singapore, the guy who went before me had a beer bottle thrown at him.

People often trivialise  and sensationalise topics for more online hits and other views, but you can get famous before you get good or you can get good before you get famous.

like you said, humour can also be subjective. How do you know where to draw the lineIJ

I won’t joke about Indian politics since my knowledge of it is not sound yet. Also, Indians are sensitive and comedy is very new here. If you look at Chris Rock, louis CK, Jerry Seinfeld, or the older generation, lenny Bruce, Rodney Dangerfield, or Richard Pryor etc, they were not merely cracking jokes. Pryor talked about how the black people were treated like slaves even in modern America. These guys spent 20 years performing at coffee shops before they were articulate and confident enough to spread a message. Chris Rock, for instance, likes to push social change. Here, someone will try to crack a joke about the Shiv Sena or on rape. To some degree, I understand, but when content is generated for shock value, people get upset.

I remember a comedian’s joke which went like this: “I was with a black girl and when we were doing it, she yelled the N-word. She looked at me and said, ‘No’. That’s when the audience started laughing and the comedian said, ‘So you thought I’d say something racist and you’re laughing at how I was not racist but it only turned out to be a rape jokeIJ’ So you see how he twisted itIJ Whether or not you laugh, you will understand the articulation. Shazia Mirza (UK) had once joked about how her mother asked her how she could just sleep with a stranger and she replied, ‘I don’t know, mum, how could youIJ’ So you see, that’s also a comment on, say, arranged marriage. Varun Grover is one guy in India who does this well and you will rarely see him get into trouble.

What do you do when you are not in the best of your spirits but have an act to performIJ

I have to fake it. For instance, my dog was unwell and hospitalised and I had a gig within 45 minutes for 600 people; there was no way other than to act.

How do you handle hecklers in the audienceIJ

Indians are very accommodating and fortunately there has been no unfortunate incident in any of my gigs. If a heckler interferes first if you are in the middle of a joke, you ignore it but if it continues, you need to put an end to it. This one time a girl kept asking me, ‘Are you singleIJ’ repeatedly. After a point, I realised if she continued, she would kill my timing for other jokes, so I asked her, ‘Are youIJ’ she said, ‘Yes!’ so I retorted, ‘Well, now we know why.’

Is humour universalIJ

References and contexts could vary. For instance, jokes about Punjabis or Gujaratis wouldn’t be funny in the US, but mostly people laugh at similar jokes. Comediennes such as Vasu Primlani, Radhika Vaz, Aditi Mittal, Neeti Palta etc have time and again shown the hypocrisy around jokes about gender, to cite an example. Men find women cracking jokes about sex uncomfortable.

How do you keep yourself updated about the happenings of the worldIJ

Social media is enabling. Besides conversations in real world, I surf the internet for current affairs.

ananyapioneer@gmail.com

Photo by: Mubin Tisekar