Bhargav Ramakrishnan talks about being fat. S. Aravind talks about being single. Suraj Sethu talks about being a Malayali. And the audience is in splits. Meet Chennai’s stand-up comics, who get on stage to talk about everyday urban issues not only to get people laughing, but quite often, thinking.
The stand-up movement is fairly new in India, but the past few years have seen an incredible growth in cities like Mumbai and Bangalore. Chennai, however, is just catching up. “We’re slow to pick up on non-classical art forms,” says Bhargav, who initiated the stand-up movement under Evam in 2011. However, it wasn’t until six months ago that he got on stage to perform himself. “I’ve acted and directed, but performing stand-up was very scary for me,” he confesses. The rush that comes out of getting a room full of people to crack-up is incredible, but the opposite can be very disheartening.
“I’m trying new material, so please be gentle on me,” says Evam’s Karthik Kumar, as he gets on stage, even after years of performing comedy and being one of the first comics from Chennai. In 2008, while Evam was staging a bunch of sketches, they decided to break the fourth wall during set change and put individuals on stage to talk to the audience. Without realising, they ventured into stand-up comedy and the audience response was encouraging enough for them to start Urban Turban in 2009. “We were scared to call it stand-up comedy at that point because that would promise people laughter,” says Bhargav. As time wore on, they fine-tuned their content and picked up many artistes along the way and introduced Chennai to the idea of stand-up comedy. In 2011, they rebranded as ‘Evam Stand-up Tamasha’ and this year, they’ve launched ‘Tickle Pickle Thursdays’ to groom new and upcoming stand-up artistes in the city.
In the mean time, four independent comics banded together earlier this year to form a stand-up comedy troop, Burma Bazaar Conspiracy (BBC). Then, they tied up with Big Mic to start an open mic night in the city, encouraging closet-comedians to try their hand at stand-up. The winner of the open mic even gets a slot to perform in one of BBC’s ticketed shows. “We’re fortunate to have a scene and we want to help others be a part of it,” says Deepu Dileepan of BBC. It’s a close-knit circuit in Chennai with less than 15 comics who take the stage regularly, so comics often attend each others’ shows and offer encouragement.
The stand-up movement is growing with weekly shows and many new avenues cropping up for people to try their hand at this art form. As for the audience, there are a lot more people who are looking at it as an entertainment option. “The older audience who, a few years back, would have been offended by our content are now more accepting of it. Society is buying into a greater bandwidth of humour,” explains Karthik.
The real challenge with stand-up comedy however, says Karthik, is figuring out the message you want to convey and then finding a way to make it funny. Most good comics are people who are keen observers of everyday occurrences because they derive content from their experiences and surroundings. “The beautiful thing about stand-up is that it is the most powerful movement that can happen in a society,” says Aravind, adding that topics like arranged marriages, lack of sex education in schools and many everyday issues can be casually discussed on stage, by just adding the right amount of humour to it. The problem with talking about social and political issues, though, is that they become stale over a period of time and comics need to constantly come up with new content. And that’s a feat that many struggle with.
Comics, off-stage, are not always funny. Bhargav drops his Tamil accent, Aravind stops exaggerating everything and Vikram Balaji confesses that even though he makes many jokes about his girlfriends, he is, in fact, married now. “When we are on stage, we become an exaggerated version of ourselves,” explains Karthik, who says it is cathartic to do what they do on stage once a week. They are louder, more dramatic and their act is often punctuated with local references to make it more relatable and elicit spells of laughter.
The scene in Chennai is promising because it is young and open, with audiences expecting nothing more than a light-hearted evening. Of late, comedians from other cities have come down to take the stage in Chennai, there are comedy workshops and there are many new entrants, like Stray Factory, that have entered the stand-up arena. “Who doesn’t want to laugh,” asks Deepu, and it becomes fairly obvious why the stand-up scene is slowly, but surely, taking shape in the city.
