“Good evening Comedy Store, it’s good to see you! Actually, that’s a lie, because I can’t see a thing,” says Sundeep Rao, as he begins his set at a comedy club in London. India’s first partially blind comedian makes no bones about it. The rest of the set is peppered with references to his disability, woven with quips about sex, caste, and politics. In another show he says, “I’m partially blind, so I can see enough to check out women.” But Rao isn’t milking his disability. The market forces of the comedy industry, he says, will weed you out, no matter what your circumstances. “My disability is not a life-threatening problem. It’s an inconvenience,” he says. “I don’t want to play that card on stage. In fact, I say I’m visually impaired, and I’ve come to terms with it. Now let’s move on and see what problems you guys might have in your life.”
“People invite me on stage for a 10-minute set. Five of those are spent in just sitting down,” says Sweta Mantrii, as she begins her piece in a Gurgaon comedy club. The differently-abled Mantrii, who started stand-up comedy in 2016, says: “I’d been talking about inclusivity, and a barrier-free environment for differently-abled people for a while.” Mantrii puts her disability at the fore of her humour, but knows there are challenges with this. Audiences are often unused to this kind of humour and their first reaction is discomfort. “So, my jokes not only have to be funny, they have to be clever,” she says. “I have to consider how I walk on, how long it takes me, how I present myself. These are all things I’ve had to learn.”
Sweta Mantrii
“I’m Nidhi Goyal and I’m blind,” begins this stand-up artist at a club in Mumbai. There is an awkward silence. You can practically hear the chairs shifting. The dynamic in the room has changed. There seems an eternity between the first line and the next, staccatoed by the odd cheer and confused applause. “I’m blind and so is love, get over it.” she says. Immediately, the tension is released. Goyal is India’s first blind female stand-up comic. “My entire existence is activism,” she says. “When a female comic does a piece on breast cancer awareness, that’s activism. When we talk about bodies and relationships, that’s activism.”
Let there be laughs
Goyal, Mantrii, and Rao are just three in a burgeoning crowd of people with disabilities who’ve taken to the humour stage. And their tales are just one strand in an industry that’s seen a seismic shift in the past few years.
Comedy in India has changed. And dramatically. An industry that didn’t exist till the early 2000s has now become a budding career option. Now, there may be people who tell you stand-up comedy originated in India in the 16th century in the form of Chakyar Koothu. It might be the same people who believe Ganesha was the product of cosmetic surgery. He wasn’t. And stand-up comedy didn’t see the light of day here till the late 2000s when the Internet brought international comedy home, primarily via Russell Peters, the Canadian comic of Anglo-Indian origin. A generation of urban, middle-class Indians realised two things: that stand-up comedy was a potential release and mode of entertainment for both performer and viewer, and that there was a space for English language humour. “In 2018, comedy has been one of the top four most watched content pillars on Prime Video India,” says Vijay Subramanian, Director & Head of Content for Amazon Prime Video in India.
It didn’t start off this way, of course. “When we started out in 1995-96, there was no comedy scene at all, except, of course, for certain political rallies,” says Cyrus Broacha, the man who woke urban TV audiences to an entirely different brand of comedy with his MTV exploits, and more so later with his Jon Stewart-inspired satirical news programme, The Week That Wasn’t . “The idea of formal stand-up comedy started much later when the likes of Vir Das entered the scene, with ticketed shows,” he says. In fact, Das’s return to India from the U.S. and Papa CJ’s from the U.K. in 2008 are often seen as watershed moments.
Breaking bads
This, of course, meant that audiences too changed their perceptions of what was acceptable, and conventional ideas of morality began to tumble. “Audiences evolved very quickly. Sex ceased to be taboo, there grew a space for political references, and so on,” Broacha says.
Growing audiences also meant that women in the male-dominated industry began to carve out a space. “When I started performing, there weren’t too many women comics around,” says Radhika Vaz, one of the country’s first professional women stand-ups. “But more importantly, the content I was doling out was different from every other comedian’s, whether male or female,” she says. “I was talking about a lot of personal things, sexuality, sexism, which nobody else was.”
Aravind S.A.
The industry has also moved away from Delhi and Mumbai, and has, at snail’s pace, made its way to other metros. Aravind S.A., one of the biggest comedy stars from Chennai, was one of the first to start stand-ups in South India. “We had several problems when I started, but the one advantage we had was that because there was nobody else around, we could perform mediocre material and get away with it,” says Aravind.
He credits a lot of his success to the Chennai-based Evam Standup Tamasha, founded by Karthik Kumar, which saw the likes of Aravind and Naveen Richard flourish. “Evam pretty much started the revolution here. They stuck to a vision when the rest of us were very unsure,” he says. It was when clips from his 2017 special Madrasi Da on Amazon Prime went viral that Aravind found himself and his city under the national spotlight.
This move away from the traditional hubs has spurred a consequent movement within regional languages. In a relatively short span, comedy has ceased to be the bastion of English performers. Hindi stand-up got a fillip when Zakir Khan burst on stage in 2016 with a set in a programme called AIB Diwas in Delhi. His brand of local slang, catch-phrases, and the trope of a small-town boy making his way through cosmopolitan Delhi hit home. Comedy seemed fresh again. This was comedy in a regional language, but with none of the misogyny and absurdity of the outlandish ‘comedy’ nights on TV channels. Today, Khan’s hour-long Amazon Prime Video special Haq Se Single and series Chacha Vidhayak Hai Humare are the two of the most popular shows on Amazon.
It spread quickly — Gujarati and Marathi stand-up has witnessed a quiet revolution. Bharatiya Digital Party (BDP), for example, is the first Marathi-only online comedy brand. Says Sarang Sathaye of BDP, “Regional film industries are as big as Bollywood, Marathi films were doing very well, but we just couldn’t figure out why Marathi comedy wasn’t making the cut.” Then, high-speed Internet connectivity into rural areas opened up hitherto unseen avenues. “Once that happened, we realised there was a market and there was access, so it was just a matter of taking that first step,” he says.
Gujarat, it is said, has the largest organised regional comedy industry, with a great degree of traction coming from the collective The Comedy Factory. The obvious benefits of performing in a regional language are those inherent to the intricacies of any language — being able to express thoughts and expressions unique to those languages. As Sathaye says, “The vocabulary of a regional language is massive, making it more fun and easier to write. We recently did a sketch on how it would be if Hogwarts were a Marathi school. There, the banks are closed for vamkukshi — which means an afternoon nap. It’s a unique thing that can’t be explained in any other language.”
Stand-up artist and satirist Sanjay Rajoura, whose trademark U.P. dialect instantly pulls you in, doesn’t believe that merely more performers in a particular language means the language is doing well. “Of course, it’s changed in terms of numbers. It isn’t a purely English-only bastion, but you can only say the scene has changed when a regional language artist does really commendable work.” Ask him for examples, and only two names spring off his tongue. “Varun [Grover], who I work with, and Kunal Kamra,” he says. “The rest really don’t interest me much.”
Piyush Sharma
Piyush Sharma, 28, quit his day-job at J.P. Morgan to become a stand-up comedian. He hit national eyeballs this year when two of his videos ‘Job Interviews’ and ‘Board Exams’ went viral. Performing primarily in Hindi, it has taken him time and patience to break into the limelight. As a young stand-up, Sharma worked hard to decide what to offer. “You want to talk about things close to your heart. But you need people to relate to you as well. So I started with relatable jokes about board exams or job interviews,” he says. “Once I’ve got the audience familiar with me, I start talking about my own stories.”
But does great humour come with great responsibility? Most comics don’t seem to think so.
“It’s best if we avoid taking ourselves too seriously,” Broacha says. “If we start thinking that on our shoulders rests the changing of society, evolving of democracy, and preservation of egalitarianism, then we’re doomed. In fact, comics shouldn’t even use words with more than four syllables!”
Goyal believes it’s subjective. “It’s an art, and art and entertainment are just as important as social change,” she says. While she believes her comedy instils a certain sort of awareness among the audiences, it isn’t an obligation. “People ask ‘She has Tinder stories? Why is she talking about men? She’s had experience with men?’ If I’m able to convince my audiences that disabled people have a life like anyone else that’s part of my mission fulfilled,” she says.
Since 2014
Rao doesn’t believe his comedy is, or even needs to be, educational. “I have enough platforms to be educational and ‘inspirational’,” he says. “Our primary goal is to make people laugh. Of course, I might be unintentionally edifying, but that’s never the explicit intention.” Rajoura disagrees. “A comic need not be responsible, but I don’t agree that a comic primarily has to be funny. Even Narendra Modi is funny, but he isn’t a comic, is he?” Rajoura began Aisi Taisi Democracy, an initiative with musician Rahul Ram and comic Varun Grover, to critique the times and social realities.
Interestingly, while most comics agree that the country’s socio-political climate and the ruling government’s actions are prime targets for comedy, it has simultaneously also been a time of self-censorship. “We have been a little more careful since 2014; we try to be less personal,” admits Broacha. “The challenge whether in India today or in the Soviet Union of the 50s is trying to find the humour without getting personal.”
Sundeep Rao
Rao, however, believes that people use political polarisation to win audiences. “If you crack an anti-Modi joke, you’ve already won over one side of the room,” he says. But the fact is, it’s almost as if ‘creative content’ has been increasing since 2014, and comics are making full use of it. Kunal Kamra’s 2017 video ‘Patriotism & the Government’ took an unsparing view of nationalism and demonetisation. He was trolled and threatened, but he has continued, branching out into a YouTube talk show called ‘Shut Up Ya Kunal’, which features political figures (from across party lines), youth leaders, and public intellectuals, engaging them on issues in a light-hearted tone.
As Rajoura points out, “Fear is never justified. What are you afraid of? You’re performing in an anonymous open mic at a Delhi pub. There isn’t anything to fear there.” But he warns that the state isn’t the biggest worry, it’s audiences. “Whether or not the state says anything, one member of the audience may get angry and get violent.” This might be why comics in India have chosen to play safe, chasing ‘likes’, ‘followers’ and ‘views’.
Entry barriers
Comedy’s challenges don’t simply start and end with content. There’s also infrastructure. Access for comics with disabilities is a huge problem. Whether to the stage or to washrooms. Then there’s sexism too, an ever-present issue. “I don’t think it’s easier for women today,” Vaz says. “That’s just the complexion of our country. Many of our performances are at night, and girls don’t even get ‘permission’ to go out at night.” In the comedy industry, it’s still males who get the shouts. Senior men won’t even talk to girls starting out, says Vaz, “and even female peers spend more time trying to get the attention of a so-called ‘senior’ male comic.”
While the industry has been conceived, created and grown at a remarkable pace in a relatively short time, it is still afflicted by all the social inequalities it started off with. Audiences have grown more mature over time, and comics hope the scene will pick up pace in eradicating these lines. As Goyal says, “Change is happening, but it’s just not fast enough.”
Meanwhile, comics are out there, punching out lines, building premises, gathering audiences, telling stories in ways never envisioned before. Some more different than others. “I am not here to entertain my audience,” says Rajoura. “My audience is here to entertain me. I say things after a lot of reading and thought, and I believe in what I say completely. Once you’re convinced about a thought, it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not.”
There clearly is a comic for every audience and perhaps an audience for every comic.
saurya.s@thehindu.co.in
