Sometimes, when Suman Kumar tells people he is a stand-up comedian, they nod knowingly before they ask, “So you do mimicry?” “India has a glorious tradition of comedy, but we don’t know about a lot of it. The Dakhini poets of Hyderabad, for example, wrote satirical prose. They were illustrating the vagaries of life and making people laugh at themselves,” he says.
Stand-up comedy as we know it today, Kumar feels, is a nascent performance art form, where censorship is still an issue and vernacular acts are yet to take off. “We are barely scratching the potential of the form. It might take another decade before stand-up finds its sweet spot in India.”
Starting off
Kumar’s tryst with comedy commenced in 2015, which was about three years after he’d quit his job in IT to unwittingly become a stay-at-home dad. “I was broke, depressed and sitting at an Open Mic event at Take5 — one of the first comedy venues in Bengaluru. That day, I told my friends who performed that they weren’t funny, so they challenged me to try my hand at it,” says Kumar.
A big fan of performers like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle and Goundamani, he decided to take the stage the following week. His set, save for one joke, bombed miserably. But that one joke made him realise that he wanted to keep performing.
Parenting tales
“Just as I was nearing the winter of my life, I found my voice. I haven’t looked back since,” says the 44-year-old, whose writing is largely derived from his life.
His début solo show, Mr. Mommy , which premièred in July 2017 in Bengaluru, is about growing up in the 90s in a sexist, misogynistic environment and later, ironically, becoming a stay-at-home dad. “I want to make people laugh with my show, but even if one to-be father decides to stay at home with his kid for six months after listening to me, then that’s a big win.” Kumar says that though his audience is always a mixed crowd, women largely like what he has to say. “People think that’s very crafty of me, but it wasn’t planned,” he chuckles.
Writing comedy helped him realise that he was capable of working as a writer. In 2016, his début novel, Ranga Half-Pants (Jaico Publishing House), hit stands, and now he is working on the screenplay for the same to be made into a Tamil movie.
He says he sometimes writes up to seven hours a day. “Just the first 30 minutes of content for Mr. Mommy took me about one year. To be a comedian, you need to be funny. But it’s a serious job, so you also need to write every single day,” he says.
Suman Kumar will perform at Bay 146, Hotel Savera, at 7.30 pm tomorrow. Tickets at ₹500 on in.bookmyshow.com.
