Stand-up comedy is on fire, spiralling up the ladder to fill the gaping hole in India’s live entertainment sector. MEENAKSHI RAO takes a look
It’s a young sport, this stand-up comedy thing. You see these 25 to 35 somethings, more men than women, delivering funny ones as the people around them bite into a chicken leg or some such. They are like the restaurant singers of yore who sang some of the best — and the worst — music to an audience listening to the clinking of glasses more than to the artiste at helm.
In pubs in and around metros, the good old DJ has given way to happening laughter rioters, some new, some somewhat seasoned, in dealing with audience disinterest as much as with pulling their interest back from those chicken wings.
And that’s what powers the comedy sector in India where live entertainment is yet to come on a full roll. From hasya kavi sammellans which your father took you to some decades back in open parks, to mushairas in auditoriums and qawwali jugalbandis — live was happening either in the Hindi heartland or in the well heeled theatre circuit of elitist metros like Mumbai and Delhi.
Today, there is Vir Das and Papa CJ — pioneers of stand-up comedy in India. If one is a rabid political satirist throwing a lot of sex and the city into your face, the other draws from experiences that are more personal. Both have a rollicking audience base, with the most expensive auditorium shows being sold out months in advance, not just in India but in laughter capitals of the world like london and New York too.
“The money is coming in, in a big way. In the next few years, stand-up comedy will be reigning in the non-Bollywood entertainment sector. But we have to take care that it does not sizzle out as that flavour of the previous season,” says newborn stand-up comedy entrepreneur Arjun Anand who has just gotten over with providing a platform to budding comedians for an open mic session at a well-heeled eatery in South Delhi.
He is now focusing on tier-II cities like ludhiana and Amritsar. “We are doing shows everywhere in Punjab. The response in tier-II cities has been good as the set-up cost is much lesser than metros. As they have no source of live entertainment so it’s a very good market,” he says. But Arjun concedes that stand-up comedy still has a long way to go, what with lots of cities and markets not been reached.
He will soon be opening a comedy club in every city his company Punchliners does shows in. “Shows like today’s are mainly to understand the market in a particular city. If I know that the audience is receptive and mature, it is the right time to open a club in that city,” he explains.
People like Arjun are expanding the business of laughter today but it was Mumbai-based Charlotte Ward who brought in India’s first season way back in 2010 through the iconic Comedy Store which she opened in lower Parel in a joint venture with the same-named UK-based comedy company run by her father Don Ward. Today, that tie-up is long over, what with some ugliness creeping into the relationship over money matters, but that has not restricted Ward from opening a new brand in the name of Canvas laugh Club with no international connection whatsoever.
Chapters of the Canvas laugh Club operate in many cities like Gurugram even as Ward has taken the eatery shows route to regain lost territory. Mehrauli’s Blue Frog, for example, became synonymous with stand-up comedy shows in the Capital which were generally sold out but the pub has since closed down. In Mumbai and Bengaluru, it is business as usual.
For Ward, 2012 was all Indian. Back then, she gathered 31 Indian comics to do 41 shows. She would then hold five shows a weekend which quickly exploded into a show every night. From just 23 shows a month, by 2013 she was hosting 44, with sold-out shows even on weekdays. At a price of Rs600 a ticket, that was no mean achievement for a non-Bollywood entertainer.
Meanwhile, comedy badshah Vir Das arrived on the scene after battling unaccommodating audience in london, being booed off 25 times in a row and only then emerging as a solo performer of some worth. His movies Delhi Belly and Go Goa Gone made him a household name but it’s his shows ‘History of India’ and ‘Battle of Da Sexes’ that altered the DNA of the Indian humour. He opened India’s first comedy business consultancy, Weirdass Comedy, and has not looked back ever since. His shows are the most expensive in India and cater to no less than 5,000 audiences in a go, every entry ticketed at a heavy price. As Vir Das tickled the funny bone of a nation generally fed up with life, the real roast was being slow cooked with a deadly spicing of irreverence, insult, brashness and an unapologetic dark format. Tanmay Bhatt co-founded the All India Bakchod (AIB) on YouTube and it took just the first show to have the nation roaring in laughter — and affront, of course. For, the filthy-mouthed AIB took on politicos, actors, celebrities, corporates and anyone who had a name to save, and the powerhouse of funny business was well on its way.
“As a profession, AIB helped us because their ‘roast’ went viral on Whatsapp and people actually checked and got to know about AIB and comedians like Tanmay and Rohan. It told people that stand-up is not just about doing mimicry and making funny voices,” says budding stand-up comedian Appurv Gupta who left his engineering profession to do comic shows full-time.
Today, it is heartening to see that the comic firmament of India has a starlit sky. The first, second, third and fourth rung of comics are doing well, most of them leaving their lucrative professions behind to make money in the unconventional suit of a stand-up comic.
Take Papa CJ. He holds an MBA degree from Oxford, did his corporate job for a while before dumping it all to try out something which excited him. He has coached executives from over 50 blue-chip companies all over the world including Nike, Google and UBS in Europe, Deutsche Bank, Accenture and E&Y in USA, Universal Music and BBC in the UK and Unilever and HSBC in Asia. Today, this former management consultant and a qualified laughter Yoga leader, does stand-up full-time and has more than 2,000 solo shows across five continents under his belt. This long-haired laughter feat has earned enough to now launch a series of charity shows to help destitute women and children, empower primary education and look after animal rights.
Comics like Papa CJ and Vir Das may be the face of Indian comedy, but there are very many who, too have left their original professions and “making huge money on the laughter dais.” Appurv may be a young gun in this field but he is taking off and happy with his earnings. Holding an engineer’s degree which he studied for “because my father had put in a lot of money for it”, he now regales audiences full-time with his engineer funny side up jokes that he throws at you after gently testing the funny bone of the crowd at hand.
“I am earning enough now to not look at an engineering profession. living in metros, we may think comedy is up there but tier-II and III cities are yet to come up. They still like the Raju Srivastava and Kapil Sharma type of comedy. While American comic Jerry Seinfeld was the richest entertainer in 2015 with earnings of $870 million, in India it was Shah Rukh Khan with $600 million. So, our stand-up is small. Except for eight-10 cities, we haven’t been able to penetrate other markets,” he feels.
Appurv has done his campus comedy and gone through the 5,000-strong heckler crowds at IITs in Delhi, Kharagpur, Kanpur and Jodhpur. “Revenue wise, corporate shows are money-spinners because they have fixed budgets and you get paid well. These are every comedian’s bread and butter. But if you talk about numbers, then YouTube is the place to be because it’s an open market,” Appurv says.
On YouTube, you need to put up bits like five or 10 minute videos, because the attention span of surfers is minimal. “My following is not sky high but my video “The type of an engineer, funny side up” in 2014 got 2.3 million views. Another video in which I insulted mobile brands like Apple, Nokia and Samsung went viral on Facebook. For going viral, Whatsapp is a bigger market than YouTube because on Whatsapp, you have a five-minute video which you can download and watch anytime. People watch your video but you can’t count the views,” Appurv points out.
Appurv has been focused on the college market from the beginning. “Since I am an engineer, I thought I could relate to students better,” he tells you, adding that the humour quotient of Hyderabad is the most pulsating because that’s where his brand of “intelligent humour” sells the best.
Indeed, content is key and this bustling field those who have content have the audience. A fact seconded by Amit Tandon, Delhi’s best observational stand-up comedian and founder of Grandmasters of Comedy. He is the married guy on the circuit with “a mother who made me, a wife who brought me up” and two children. Tandon quit his management job to take to comedy. He paints laughter circles around sorrow and has learnt to laugh at almost everything that was once painful to him. “I get all my humour from my surroundings, I live my humour. A lot of my topics come from my upbringing, friends, family, wife and kids,” he tells you.
As he sees it, stand-up comedy in India is exploding. “The audience is growing by 10 to 20 times a year, at least. Earlier, all shows happened in metro cities but now you have tier-II and III cities also on the list, Kanpur, Chandigarh, Nasik and Guwahati. Our genre has been late in arriving. As live entertainment was not really big, we didn’t have big theatres in India and there was only a set of select elite people who would watch theatre, nothing beyond that. With the arrival of Vir Das and Papa CJ, things changed,” he explains.
For him, different audiences come to hear different comedians. “So, Kenny has his own following, a mix; Zakir’s audience is largely younger and male; and Kanan Gill has lots of girls as his audience. I largely cater to 30-35-plus, married people,” Tandon says.
The business side, meanwhile, is growing with time. There are a lot of people who are looking at larger opportunities, at the future of business. “We have investors coming in. Because comedy is growing at a very fast pace so they too need to grow at the same pace, they need to understand and learn from the West where comedy will be in 3 or 5 years and start building accordingly,” Tandon reasons.
All said, and since stand-up comedy is still young and fledgling, it has to look at where the money will come from. So, even though auditoriums are good to go, it’s the corporate shows that are must for every other kind of show a stand-up comic does.
“As far as corporate shows are concerned, I’ve had a great time. In corporate shows, you need to keep away from topics they do not want to talk about, which is fair enough as they are paying for what they don’t want to listen. As comedians, we need to clearly communicate to a corporate what kind of set-up we need. We’ve to understand that we’ve done 500 shows but these corporates organising the show may not have seen a single one,” Tandon says on the need to educating the main fund-givers in this sector.
Indian humour, Tandon asserts, “is as good as any international act in terms of the topic, the flavour we bring and the insights we give.” His favorite comics in India and abroad in terms of writing are people like Abhijeet Ganguly, Rahul Subramaniyam. “Zakir is amazing in terms of touching the cord. I love watching Kunal Kabra and Vir Das in terms of creating new benchmarks. Papa CJ, the way he handles his interaction with people, he can do a one-hour show purely talking to people,” Tandon says.
Travelling as a comic, Tandon realised every place came with its own idiosyncrasies. “In Malaysia, we had advertised for a Hinglish show but only an English audience showed up. So, we had 75 White people out of 78. We had to change the entire format and do our entire show in English, instead of a Hindi-English mix as planned. That was quite a challenge. It was very weird in Australia because they did a VIP ticket which meant that only those people who had got VIP tickets could take pictures with us which was very weird for me. It’s very interesting in the UK where we’ve had shows with 80 per cent of the audience being women. When you ask them about their husbands, they say they’re home and taking care of the children because babysitters are very expensive. Every country has its own thinking and humour quotient,” Tandon tells you.
This comic finds the humour quotient of Delhi high. “People in Delhi are from everywhere so it’s a kind of a junction. We’ve seen some fantastic comedy coming out from here in Hindi, English, Bhojpuri to Punjabi. You get all the forms here, purely in terms of variety and quality, Delhi’s been amazing. Unfortunately, many performers move to Mumbai because that’s where you go as the next step in your career,” Tandon says.
Top women comediennes of India
Radhika Vaz: She is one of the most recognised faces of stand-up comedy in the country today. Born in Mumbai, she went for improvisational theatre class which helped her in her performances and writing. Her comedy specials Unladylike and Older. Angrier. Harrier. has been extremely popular.
Aditi Mittal: Aditi Mittal is one of the first women to do stand-up comedy in India. She rated her as one of India’s top 10 stand-up comedienne. She is featured in CNNIBN.com as top 30 witty, intelligent and incredibly funny Indian women to follow on Twitter. Her jokes cover everything from Osama to toddlers to Miss India winners.
Neeti Palta: She brings to the English stand-up comedy scene in India what lacks — a woman’s perspective. She was voted as the best Stand Up Comic at the Oz Fest and was India’s first stand-up to perform at Melbourne for Melbourne Comedy Festival 2013. Her first show was O Teri. Shows like What The Frock, Man O Man, That's What She Said, etc are worth a mention.
Aparna Nancherla: She is an American comedienne who performs in India too. She began her stand-up career in Washington, DC. You can see her on HBO’s Crashing and new seasons of Master of None and love on Netflix.
Vasu Primlani: She an Indian stand-up comedienne and teaches management sustainability at Xavier’s institute of Management, Bhubaneswar. She received the 2015 Nari Shakti Puraskar for her work. She has done thousands of shows and is probably the only comic in the world to perform during a flight in the US.
