They made us laugh with their tongue-in-cheek comedy and even got into trouble with their famous roast comedy’. But what kept All India Bakchod (AIB) go on and produce good content is not just their passion but the love of their fans which is only increasing with over 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube. Recently, Tanmay Bhat and Rohan Joshi joined their fans who turned up in huge numbers at YouTube Fanfest held in Delhi and Mumbai.
Talking about his craziest fan moment, Joshi says: “After the roast, a girl showed up at my house and asked me for the unedited copy. I said ‘I don’t know you. Why would I give you the whole roast like thatIJ’ But she was so adamant that I had to comply with her wish,” Joshi recalls.
Bhat, on the other, had a rather sweet moment. “I received a phone call from one of my fans in the middle of the night, crying over the phone and saying ‘Don’t ask me how I got your number. I have had a terrible day and I just saw your video and it made me feel good’,” Bhat says, adding that he was once mobbed by fans on the streets of Chandigarh.
After their tryst with producing fiction webisodes and TV show On Air with AIB, the second season of which is already in the making, the team is now all set to produce a feature film that will go on the floor by the end of this year. “It could be drama, comedy, romance, murder mystery, action, everything and anything. A good idea and powerful story is what we are looking for that can turn out to be a commercially successful and critically acclaimed movie,” Bhat tells you.
Their writer’s residency programme First Draft is bringing together talented writers from different walks of life to get trained in fiction writing. This has, in turn, made these comedians learn from these aspirants. “The world is way larger than we think it is in terms of where ideas and stories come from. There is insane amount of talent. We’ve a person who runs an arena multimedia computer training programme in Raipur and used to write stories at night and translate English books to Hindi for publishers. There is a 27-year-old author from lucknow who is writing books in Hindi. One of the contestants, Manoj Kumar, who hails from Korba, was doing a correspondence course to get a degree so that he could apply to FTII. He is the biggest cinema fan that I know. The amount of talented people we meet is mindblowing. Through this programme we want to remove the obstacles for others which we faced when we started off,” Joshi says.