Before he became a stand-up comic, Vaibhav Sethia did multiple architecture gigs, toiled on remote oil rigs, wrote episodes of a horror TV show which was never released, and assisted direction for a Bengali movie which did release but, “Was so terrible that most cinema halls stopped screening it in four days”.
Now, after over 1000 private, public and corporate stage shows across many major cities in the country, his Amazon Prime stand-up special, Don’t, was launched yesterday. He hopes to find a new audience base on the internet through this show, because unlike YouTube clips which are free, short and only contain snippets of his comedy, he feels a show will offer insight into his persona. “I talk about being bitten by mosquitoes, my experiences with customer care, how phones have ruined our lives, my reaction to my grandparents, my increasing weight and other such everyday things. I go the extra mile to discuss these things in a way which we wouldn’t in common conversation and give the audience a new perspective,” he says.
Chasing a dream
An architecture graduate from IIT Rourkee, the now 30-year-old got on stage for the first time in December 2012, after moving home to Kolkata to deal with an injury. “This is a legendary story among Kolkata comics: It was the first ever open mic held in the city. The prize was ₹1 lakh, and only four of us were competing. The guy who won never did comedy again. The other three of us are still comics,” he sniggers.
Always the funny guy amongst his friends, getting on stage made Sethia feel like he was friends with the entire audience. He had found exactly what he wanted to do for a living but did not know how to build a career in comedy. “There was no scene in Kolkata; we would do one show every two months. In the weeks in between, I would wake up in the afternoon and sit on my laptop all day. My parents were disappointed because I was giving up great job offers to get on stage once in a while,” he recalls.
Staying on stage
Relentless, he reached out to full-time stand-up artistes to figure out how to make it lucrative. He travelled to Mumbai frequently to get more stage time and worked on building a scene in Kolkata through Comedified, an outfit he started with comic Anirban Dasgupta. “I just wanted to get as much stage time as possible, because, as they say, practice makes a man perfect,” he says. In early 2016, he moved to Mumbai to pursue his dream because, “I realised there was no other place I could grow as much”.
Now, a known name in the comedy circuit, he performs over 20 paid shows a month, and still gets on stage every day to hone his skill set. “I want to talk about subjects like parallel universes and the judicial system, but I haven’t found a way to do it in a funny way yet. There are times when [topics like that] just feel like a TED talk,” he chuckles.
Watch Don’t on Amazon Prime.
