Upma lovers need to unite. They need to file a PIL against comedian Praveen Kumar. Or start an online petition. Or better still, wage a war.
The Bengaluru-based stand-up comedian’s latest Tamil show, Mr Family Man , takes liberal digs at the humble upma and praises biryani to the hilt. It is a comedy route that really works with family audiences, which Praveen says is his “primary target”.
“My goal is that stand-up comedy should be watched by everyone in the family and not by youngsters alone,” says Praveen. In that pursuit, Praveen goes about describing his everyday life and his interactions with his wife and daughter in detail, thus eliciting laughs from the audience. The other characters who form a major part of his show are not celebrities or trending topics: it is the electrician who does not know where the main switch is, and the painter who cannot speak anything but Hindi.
“Put me in a corner for 24 hours and ask me to write jokes, and I probably won’t be able to,” he says. But if you let him live his life — going shopping with the wife and playing with the apartment kids — Praveen would probably have a book full of funny material to perform. “I live my life and go with the flow. Whenever there is some drama, there’s always humour and a story that can be derived from it.”
His true stories (“sugar-coated with masala”) are the ones that play out at his house, and his wife and daughter are, in his own words, his biggest critics. “I perform in front of them before I present it in public forums. They mostly don’t laugh, and if they do, I know that it’s an excellent joke.”
The other USP of Praveen Kumar, something that is evident in Mr Family Man and his previous hit, 36 Vayathinile , is that it is bereft of sexual innuendos and swear words, which other stand-ups use quite liberally. “I wouldn’t crack one in front of my mother, would I? I’m not comfortable doing those kind of jokes now,” says the comedian, who has been using lockdown time by conducting Tamil cinema quizzes (including ones on stars like Rajinikanth, Ajith and Vijay) on his Twitter handle every Wednesday.
His next act, which he’s penning down now, will also not have any of them — for it is about a real-life tale that happened in a single day. “It’s about my wedding and reception,” he reveals, “I’m hoping to write an hour-long material on the happenings of that day.”
That might require quite some recollection, for 38-year-old Praveen is now a ‘full-fledged pot-bellied bald family man’, which has turned out to be his USP. “Being Superman may be easy, but being a Family Man is the most difficult thing ever,” he signs off.
Mr Family Man is streaming on Amazon Prime Video
