At its best, stand-up exposes our foibles, our eccentricities, our biases and prejudices. It urges the audience to laugh at itself.
“One need not glamourise or glorify what comedians say; it’s just comedy. It has to be forgotten. Only a person with humour can appreciate humour,” said Saad Khan, the host of The Improv, a Bengaluru-based improvisational comedy format where performers and the audience interact and feed off each other’s wit.
Diverse audience
From stand-up to improvisations to skits, a host of comedians in Bengaluru — some established, others still finding their voice — are performing to a receptive audience. And it’s not just the youth or well-heeled IT professionals who are turning to comedy for a bit of relief. More often than not, comedians are catering to a broad audience base from youth to senior citizens.
The city has nearly two dozen professional comedians, most of them in their mid- and late 20s, who have quit their nine-to-five jobs to carve out a career in humour.
“Bengaluru is catching up with other cities like Mumbai. Nearly 25 are in the reckoning here,” says Daniel Fernandes (29), who divides his time between his base in Mumbai and Bengaluru where he helps select the line-up for the city’s recently launched ‘The Comedy Club’.
When launched in May in Bengaluru, That Comedy Club earned the distinction of being the first such in south India. All the 15 shows organised in a month ran to packed houses.
“Bengaluru is ready for comedy,” says 28-year-old Sumendra Singh, who goes by the name Sam, and initiated the opening of the club in Bengaluru. He was formerly an event-and-music producer who took to organising comedy shows.
Seeing the huge response at clubs, restaurants and culture platforms, Bengaluru also saw its first Comedy Fest last October where 56 comedians performed two dozen programmes in three days to packed houses.
Established comedian Sundeep Rao (33) chucked his IT job to experience the flip side of life and laugh. The widely travelled comedian says that the city has woken up to comic.
Still a long way to go
While comedy is gaining ground in Bengaluru and other parts of India, the scene is not as vibrant or varied as other international cities. “Cities in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia have hundreds of comedy clubs and month-long festivals. Comparatively, India is yet to catch up," feels comedian Sanjay Manaktala who shifted from California six years ago to Bengaluru. Manaktala travels extensively and has pulled off nearly 1,000 shows in English ‘Stand-up observational’ comedy.
However, there aren’t too many female comedians. Bengaluru-based Sumukhi Suresh (29) says that for the most part, audiences are welcoming. “That said, women hardly laughed at my jokes earlier. So gender discrimination for me is an irony,” she says. And for all the ups and downs, she doesn’t regret changing her career from ‘food scientist to comedian’.
Like the court jester, the comedian occupies important space in the fabric of entertainment. Sundeep believes that comedians have a role in labelling, channelling and classifying humour for the public. Theirs is not an easy job. Be it political satire or commentaries on say the education system or the death penalty, successful comedians rarely have the luxury of shying away from issues that people are talking about. The key is to get the message across and have the audience in splits at the same. As Sumendra puts it, for comedy to work, “it cannot be contained within marked boundaries”.
