Have you ever thought of the Internet as the Wild Wild West? That would make the content creators, including All India Bakchod, The Viral Fever, Kanan Gill, Being Indian and city-based channel Put Chutney, the raiders. “We are going to get as much real estate as possible, and then pray to god there is petrol beneath,” laughs Rajiv Rajaram, creative director, Put Chutney. Anuvab Pal, writer of the cult comedy film, Loins of Punjab Presents , the play Chaos Theory and the hilarious YouTube video Tinder in India , nods in agreement. “I’m late to the whole online medium… while I was on the road — Cambridge, New York, Austin, Dubai — performing comedy, All India Bakchod was formed. They didn’t travel much; they just put up their content on the Internet for the world to see.”
It’s a few hours before Rascalas Comedy Night at US101. The two star acts for the evening, Anuvab Pal and Rajiv Rajaram, are each trying to get the edge off in their own way: Anuvab sips on coffee, while Rajiv, on beer. The two men — both playwrights, screen writers and stand-up comedians — have never met. But, of course, they are aware of each other’s work. Courtesy: the Internet. “If I hadn’t made those videos, when I travel to other cities like Mumbai, the artistes there wouldn’t already know my work,” explains Rajiv, who was involved in videos like Put Chutney’s What If Batman Was From Chennai and Enna da Rascalas’ South of India , which went viral overnight.
The two are part of a rare collective, where the worlds of theatre and comedy collide. They are, most importantly, story tellers. While Anuvab’s tryst with comedy came about accidentally while promoting The President Is Coming , a 2009 satirical film he penned, Rajiv’s call to screen writing came with the 2014 Tamil remake of the box-office hit Band Baaja Baaraat , called Aaha Kalyanam , because of his fame as a stand-up artiste in Chennai.
“How long did it take to script?” asks Anuvab. “Two years,” says Rajiv, and adds that the film didn’t even do well. Anuvab shakes his head, “Just think, you could have produced 24 videos in the same time. Even the Bollywood film I am shooting now, I wrote four years ago. That’s a long time.” “And it’s a short life,” says Rajiv. The Internet, in that way, offers ultimate democracy. “It’s the purest art form where an artist can put out any work he wants to,” says Anuvab. The flipside? It’s up against everything else out there.
“Initially, I was very sceptical of the medium, because I am from the generation that grew up before the YouTube phenomenon happened. Suddenly, you are competing with someone who puts up a video of a cat stroking a pig and that has a million hits. So, how does that make you any better as an artiste?” asks Anuvab. Rajiv responds, “But you have your work out there, so the next time you go to a new city as a performer, you can invite people to come watch your work live.”
Sorabh Pant and Sapan Verma, Mumbai-based comedians who are part of the East India Comedy collective, recently released a video, EIC Outrage: Women vs Engineering College , reacting to news of the ridiculous restrictions posed on students in some Chennai-based colleges. The video has over one lakh views. Now, not only have they got a large part of the country laughing about an issue that was confined to the South, they have also won many new fans from this part of the country.
“YouTube is like modern television,” says Anubav, “a medium you just can’t ignore as an artiste,” while Rajiv adds, “I look at all of us in this ecosystem as MGM and keystone cops, like Laurel and Hardy… the artists from the early 1900s who were doing short form content, trying to evolve from that to something bigger.”
The shortcut to stardom that YouTube provides did not come as easily before. “Will Ferrell had to become a movie star, Ray Romano had to do Everybody Loves Raymond and Jerry Seinfeld had to star in Seinfeld . But now, Kanan Gill just has to put up a hilarious film review and three million people watch his work,” explains Anuvab.
The Internet, every day, throws up five exabytes of content. So how does someone stand out, when you have several videos of babies laughing and cats scratching themselves that go viral every day? “I think it’s all driven by hope,” laughs Rajiv. Both artistes say that it’s about remaining authentic and honest, even though you have no control over what happens once the content goes up online. “The film I did after Tinder in India — about a man who had to take off his pants in front of an uncle because he was bugging him — got less than 3,000 views. It didn’t bother me at all. I still find it very funny,” chuckles Anuvab.
