Praveen Kumar spent eight years thinking up jokes in Tamil and translating them into English for his stand-up shows. “When I finally decided to take the plunge into full-time Tamil comedy a couple of years ago, I realised how much easier it was. After all, it is the language in which I think,” he says. Today, this has taken him all over the world — Singapore, Malaysia, Dubai, Hong Kong, and the UK, with upcoming tours to Australia and the US next month. In addition, he’s one of the judges on the Amazon Prime Video reality show, Comicstaan , which is currently filming its Tamil version, the first for a regional language on the platform.
What started with Papa CJ and Vir Das’ shows a decade ago, led to the entry of (the now defunct) The Comedy Store from London in Mumbai in 2011. With open mics becoming de rigueur in major metros, comics like Kanan Gill, Biswa Kalyan Rath and Kenny Sebastian converted their YouTube fame into live shows. And now that Hindi and English comics have made their mark, with specials on Netflix and Prime, we find it is increasingly the turn of the vernacular.
All about the states
Praveen Kumar credits Tamil’s “evolved” sense of humour to the number of comedians in the film industry — Wikipedia lists over 150 under the Tamil comedians category.
There’s been active growth in Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, even Sambalpuri (an Odiya dialect), with Malayalam lagging a little behind. As Kannada comic Pavan Venugopal quips, “English stand-up has become like engineering. Everyone is doing it, and it’s saturated.” But just as they do in the number of engineering colleges in India, Tamil Nadu is leading the pack when it comes to the vernacular. Vijay Subramaniam, Director and Head of Content, Amazon Prime Video India, says that the decision to extend Comicstaan to Tamil was an easy one, based on the preferences they saw in the market. “Comedy is much loved in Tamil. A growing number of young adults are taking a very different tone in their comedy, as opposed to mainstream films,” he says. The vibrant meme culture also stands testimony to this: like the ‘Pray for Nesamani’ phenomenon that was trending on Indian Twitter. It referenced a scene from the film Friends , where comedian Vadivelu gets hit with a hammer (people assumed it was a real person/incident, and their concern went viral).
Kumar credits Tamil’s “evolved” sense of humour to the number of comedians in the film industry — Wikipedia lists over 150 under the Tamil comedians category. “Each of them does something different: Vivek is satirical, Vadivel is slapstick, Santhanam is sarcastic, Yogi Babu is self deprecatory...” he explains.
Kumar adds that being exposed to various genres also makes it easier to adapt when you’re trying to cut it as a comic and find your own voice. Then there’s the long-standing pattimandram circuit, with stalwarts like Solomon Pappaiah and Simson Raja. This format of debate involves a moderator and two teams speaking for and against a topic, with humorous takes on situations and their opponents. “You could call it a cousin sister to stand-up,” says Kumar.
Sticking to their roots
While Kumar, and other Tamil comics like Jagan Krishnan and Mervyn Rozario , started out in English, Annamalai Lakshmanan, the founder of Tanglish Comedy, was clear he’d only use his mother tongue for stand-up. Known as Mala in the Chennai circuit, he says, “It wasn’t about principles; I simply felt that I could best express myself in the language I think in.” When he started back in 2015, it was unheard of. In a year, he started his collective, organising open mics that brought up more Tamil comics and a very appreciative and encouraging audience.
To give context to the growth, Rabhinder Kannan of Evam Standup Tamasha, a comic and producer of regional language shows, says, “About a year back, we would’ve hardly had one or two comics in Tamil out of 15 performances. Now that number stands at about 30-40% of the crowd.” Chennai-based Evam started out as a theatre group, and grew into a performing arts organisation with various verticals, of which stand-up artist management is one of their top operations. And among the artists they manage, five out of 12 perform in Tamil.
A major factor are international tours, which go to pockets brimming with Tamilians, especially in the US: think the Bay Area, Detroit, Boston. Depending on the comic, the crowds are sizeable, too. While Kumar is able to draw about 700 people for a solo show in Chennai, half that number turned up at his Kuala Lumpur show — not surprising considering 10% of the city is of Tamil origin.
Annamalai Lakshmanan founded the Tanglish Comedy collective in 2016, organising open mics that brought up more Tamil comics and a very appreciative and encouraging audience.
Closer home, Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities are popular places for short tours. Venues are unusual, too: shows have been held at an art gallery in Coimbatore and in the more formal settings of hotel conference rooms in Vellore, Tiruchirapalli and Madurai. The reach of Tamil stand-ups also extends across borders, as Jagan and Mervyn have three shows of their musical set, Oru Time Pakalam , lined up in Bengaluru. Ticket sales, both international and local, are the money-makers for collectives, who also act as artist management for the comics.
Looking beyond personal
Although Tamil comics are a fairly recent addition to the comedy repertoire in India, the pay disparity is quite small when compared to English and Hindi. Kannan explains that it’s more about the reach of the comic and the kind of crowd they are able to pull in, than the language they speak in. Mala adds, “A beginner with a few months’ experience would start at around ₹10,000, while an experienced comic with over three years of work can command over ₹1 lakh (per show).”
When it comes to themes, Mala feels political comedy is not an issue in Tamil. “We have a lineage of Cho Ramaswamy and satirists like Gnani Sankaran. So the audience has largely been receptive to humour on politics,” he says. Kumar, however, feels otherwise, considering he had a bad experience with a political party taking offence to a throwaway line about their leader in one of his shows. “That’s why my latest show, Mr Family Man , is only about me, my wife, and my daughter. You see, I want to return home safe after each show,” he says dryly.
Kannan agrees, saying that in the larger sense of the term, we are still exploring the personal stuff before getting into anything else. “It takes a while to get into hardcore political comedy; we don’t have a Kunal Kamra yet. That, in itself, took time. We’re basically following the same path that English stand-up took to reach where it is now,” he says. The amount of work that goes into changing audience perspective is massive and a difficult operation that they are willing to work on.
So with Comicstaan , this is what the comics hope to achieve. A show like The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (also a Prime Original) romanticises the world of stand-up — a housewife from the 1950s who goes on stage without any material and kills it every time with her stream-of-consciousness comedy. But with this reality show, Kumar says, “It will show how much work goes into creating a joke; we’re not just fooling around with a microphone on stage, no matter how easy and fun it looks.”
For more on other languages and Comicstaan 2, read Where Indian regional language comedy is heading in 2019 .
