mid-day turns 40: Is this a revolution?

Anuvab Pal's earliest humour columns were in mid-day. One of stand up's brightest star wraps his head around how and why comedy became bigger than the movies

It was June 2010, and an anxious joke-hungry packed audience waited outside, 300 strong as we were about to take the stage Friday night at what was then The Comedy Store Mumbai. I remember a conversation with comedian Tanmay Bhat, in the dark backstage area, which went something like this.

Tanmay: I can see stand-up comedy becoming huge in India.

Me: I'm predicting the Comedy Store will shut down in two weeks. In fact, this could be our last show'

If someone had bet against me that night, they would have made a lot of money.

It has been about 10 years since urban stand-up comedy started, although I'm sure great Indian comics like Johnny Lever, Sunil Pal or Raju Srivastava will argue that we have been laughing a lot longer than that, at ourselves. However, with the advent of the Comedy Store in Mumbai, an epicentre formed for what was to become a movement. Prior to that, Vir Das and Papa CJ and people like that were pioneers of things, finding venues and audiences where none existed and unbeknownst to them maybe, laying the foundations for what would eventually become hundreds of crores of a legitimate industry all these years on. (Or hundreds of rupees of a legitimate industry, depending on whom you speak to).

Now, people have their favourite comedians, their favourite jokes, Facebook fan pages, and sensibly, like any established art form, colleague hatred and petty jealousy. Agents and managers appear suddenly out of thin air like a money Genie and block any chat between a well-known comedian and a show inquiry saying the jokes will flow only when the money does, like a humour petrol pump. For full disclosure, I say this not as a complaint but as a part of the problem, i.e., am as guilty with my own Genie.

Also, comedy collectives were born much like boy bands. Point being, millions have seen Indian stand up, every corporate event and every college has a stand-up event, newspapers ask us to write about what on earth is going on — like I'm doing — and very soon, stand-up will be ubiquitous with Indian entertainment, much like Daler Mehndi on a playlist or Gavaskar in cricket commentary, if it isn't already. And in the future, I wouldn't be surprised if someone asked the hugely popular comedian Zakir Khan to get a ticket and run for elections.

I remember reading a Cyrus Broacha quote, from a while ago where he said, 'It's a sad day when people take comedy seriously'. That's true, but it would be silly if an industry was erupting, like it was in 2012-13, and as a comedian, you were not part of the eruption but far away, watching. That's like being a four-man band in the 1960s watching The Beatles performing in Liverpool and thinking, 'This is not going anywhere, let's become plumbers.' I remember a then young-now star comedian telling me, "I never expected to get paid for this so when someone asked how much to do you charge, I just said one lakh as a joke. And the person said fine. I gulped. As an aside, I see Cyrus as sort of the Moses of Indian comedy — he was the original star. He parted the sea, so we could cross.

Nowadays, I am also told of anecdotes of stalkers, blackmailers, and also, for political comedians, delightful things like Twitter haters with, 'I find u kill you + family anti desh dog saala'. When you have that much creepy hatred, comedy must be doing something right.

Also, things like Amazon specials, Comicstaan and most importantly, YouTube became great avenues for audiences to be lazy, not pay and watch uncensored, non-Kapil Sharma jokes, from urban comedians who became stars off the back of YouTube. The stage gave rise to the stand-up comedians in the West. In India, mobile phones did. Today household names like Biswa Kalyan Rath, Kanan Gill, Amit Tandon, Atul Khatri, Sorabh Pant, Vipul Goel, Varun Grover and Aditi Mittal, to name a few, were able to reach millions of people because cheap data allowed India to lounge back and enjoy their world view in a way not seen by any stage art form. Once the gates fell, i.e., you didn't need television's approval because you went straight to the Internet, sketch comedy thrived with Viral Fever and AIB doing their thing. Television eventually tried to co-opt Youtube comedy but was too late to the game. A revolution happens when existing structures cannot tame you — that's what social media did for India's comedy. The AIB roast would have been just an event at NSCI Club. YouTube made it a global phenomenon, discussing the limits of Indian censorship, with The BBC covering it.

Along with the fame and money came crisis that any industry born too early and erupting at a pace no one could keep up with, like a millennial volcano, would face. Sexism, misogyny, harassment, all the stuff that other workplaces evolve into, hit comedy companies before they could evolve. It is hard to be running offices of hundreds of twenty-somethings buzzing with joke ideas, if you are the same age and never managed a corporate before. And find yourself, for having written a few punchlines, with a valuation of 100 crores and title of CEO. Gulp, as that young comedian once said. Although I will say this, to those imbeciles that gleefully celebrate the failure of the many comedy companies that folded or broke up: At least they tried.

They gave India something we never had and blew up in that glorious volcano. All those tearing them down never made a single person laugh, which is an asset way more than all their hate combined or the money lost or the FIRs compiled.

Back in 2010 though, we had no idea any of this would happen. All of us were on the verge of something, sharing a green room in Lower Parel, nervously trying out jokes, impressed with and impressing each other, slowly getting the confidence to rent halls, shoot stand-up, form collectives. To write sketches, to walk into a black hole of an undiscovered profession with our families and partners saying, "Are you nuts?"

And the audiences that came along — incapable of articulating what they were laughing at or why they were coming.

This was before the money, the agents, the competition, the FIRs, the news channels, the international flights, the Twitter fandom, the #metoo.

Nowadays, we rarely see each other, except on social media or at airports. Within comedy, our lives have diverged into different niches. Some do only Hindi, some cater to 'clean' corporates, some to millennials, some do jokes only in the vernacular, some face right-wing wrath. I do a lot of English stand up, so I divide my time between Mumbai and the West. I see online all of us posting about shows around the world. A far cry from 2009 when I went on stage at a restaurant on Marine Drive and said, to an audience who had no idea what stand-up was, 'So I'm here to tell you some jokes' and an older Maharashtrian gentlemen replied, 'Not now, I'm eating'.

Don Ward, who took a chance on the Mumbai Store in 2010, which later became Canvas, had seen all of this play out in London in the 1960s. I asked him if India is going the same route. "History repeats," he answered.

I was pessimistic because I thought stand up would go the way of MTV/ Channel V VJs. Big for a while in the mid 90s, then gone. Canvas in the old location at Lower Parel is no more and many new comedy venues have popped up. As have so many new comedians who see this as a proper job now inspired by the first lot who will eventually be forgotten, as is the way with art. I asked Kunal Kamra, the star comedian and close friend, who is definitely the future (and present) of the scene, whether all this was worth it. His reply, "If you take it seriously, it is definitely not worth it."

Anuvab Pal will present Democracy & Disco Dancing at the Edinburgh festival in August

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