Mohit Sharma and Ankita Shrivastav’s Oye Stand Up, held recently at On the Go, spared no one: the rich, middle class and poor, corporate companies and their employees, food, Bollywood, north Indians, south Indians, mothers, coconuts, gyms, diets ... all these were were the butt of their jokes.
Sharma’s take on Bollywood, for example. “If you feel a lack of self-confidence, what should you do?” The audience looked clueless. “Join Bollywood. The industry will give you enough confidence to do anything. You can be a businessman, actor, singer and artist at the same time,” he said offering Salman Khan as an example.
Switching between English and Hindi, he entertained his audience with his witty dialogues and role play. Sample this one about Farhan Akhtar. “You might be his fan but don’t tell me you are a fan of his singing.” The audience laughed when he sang in Farhan Akhtar’s voice.
When Shrivastav joined him, they explored the life of the middle class and “the rich people who try to look middle class”. Sarcasm and puns filled their script. “I know they are all middle class. Shah Rukh Khan sat next to me in an Uber pool last week and Katrina Kaif stood in queue with me for 45 minutes outside a restaurant.”
They spoke about the hardships of driving a two-wheeler and going grocery shopping carrying the helmet. “We go inside the grocery store with our helmets on. Why?” Sharma asked. An audience member called out, “For safety.” Sharma’s response was, “Yes but not yours but that of your helmet. What if someone steals it if you leave it with your bike?”
Corporate employees have tummies “like flyovers under their ties” and name tags are like extensions of our bodies, they said, while lampooning corporate life.
Speaking of her experiences in South India, Shrivastav recollected the expression of a waiter when she asked for chutney without coconut and Nescafe instead of filter coffee. “He gave me a look that only a mother can give her child when she accidentally goes through their Internet history.” She also spoke about expensive food with fancy names that turned out to be “just sabji on a piece of bread”.
The performance was followed by an audience interaction. Both Sharma and Shrivastav found the people in the city to be “welcoming.” Entrepreneur Harshavardhan Sridhar found their performance “very enjoyable and entertaining” but, since many of their jokes were in Hindi, quite a few people didn’t follow them. Like Abinav PC, a Std XI student who “couldn’t understand most of it because of the language barrier. I cannot follow Hindi.”
Asked why they didn’t translate the jokes, Sharma and Shrivastav said that it would lose the punch if it was not in Hindi.
