Banana peel... dhadaam! What next?

The Comedy Store is bringing hardcore stand-up shows to Mumbai... Soon, it will even open a club here. But are we ready to go beyond slapstick?

The Comedy Store is bringing hardcore stand-up shows to Mumbai... Soon, it will even open a club here. But are we ready to go beyond slapstick?

Picture this being said on a live show: "I'm a Jew, but I'm not a practising Jew. If I were, I'd have picked out the Muslim in this crowd and forcibly occupied his seat." Oops! That's one joke Ian Stone probably won't be allowed to crack when he's performing in the city this week.

The British stand-up artiste and two others, Paul Tonkinson and Sean Meo, arrive in Mumbai on June 4 along with Don Word, founder of The Comedy Store, UK, for three performances and a recce of what the Indian audience wants. Later this year, The Comedy Store will set up shop at Phoenix Mills. But can we laugh at ourselves? True, our television sets are bursting with multiple seasons of Laughter Challenge, the never-ending Comedy Circus, kiddie acts on Chhote Miyan and the recently launched Hans Baliye (couple comic acts), but there still are full-stops to humour as Indians see it.

Word's word

Don Word claims that his team and he are perfectly aware of the boundaries they can't afford to cross while performing in the city. "We'd never deliberately poke fun at anyone," he asserts. Deepak Bedi, CEO, Horseshoe Entertainment, who is helping bring down The Comedy Store seconds that, "We don't want to offend anyone.

Of course, a comic will make fun of anything. It takes an intelligent human being to laugh at himself."

Most of India still sniggers at the problems of excess weight, people who stutter, men with female tendencies (and vice versa), homosexuality and eunuchs. Sumanto Chattopadhyay, executive creative director, Ogilvy South Asia agrees. He even goes to the extent of saying that Indians don't really have a sense of humour.u00a0

"We're a thin-skinned lot... we can't laugh at ourselves, we're offended easily," he states.

Laughter challenged

Shekhar Suman thinks so too. The actor, best known for his politically incorrect series, Movers and Shakers, a desi version of Tonight Show with Jay Leno, says, "India is not the best place for humour. Our films and TV shows feel the need to spell out every joke. Sadly, a lot of it is toilet humour." Shekhar, who has also been a judge on The Great Indian Laughter Challenge, a hunt for stand-up comedians, says that while Seasons One and Two brought good talent to the fore, Season Three was "horrible". "There was such a paucity that the dregs came up to the finishing line." He blames this on the mushrooming of such shows over the past couple of years. "They've only grown quantitatively. The quality is another matter altogether."

The Dekh Bhai Dekh actor's favourite brand of humour is the subtle type with a subtext. "Brit humour is challenging," he says, with regard to The Comedy Store. "It might work here but we can't seem to move away from the clichu00e9d jokes of man falling into manhole, man with a squint, fat woman and the evergreen guy slipping on a banana peel."u00a0

Vir Das has a different view. The Walking on Broken Das stand-up artiste who specialises in relationship humour, speaks of his personal experience: "A few years ago, I started with little acts in restaurants for an audience of 25-odd people. Then I moved on to TV. Today, I usually get a hall filled to the brim with 2,500 people. I think the success of a certain form of entertainment depends on how financially viable it is in that society. We are ready."

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Vir feels The Comedy Store artistes are pros in high-quality humour. "Which is what we in India have been craving." He is more critical about the various stand-up comedy shows on the tube, not even choosing to label them as slapstick. "Charlie Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy those guys specialised in slapstick humour. These shows are just bad humour, if I may say so," he states.

Purbi Joshi, who can do a goggle-eyed Sridevi in her sleep, says spoofs and mimicry are the current favourites of the Indian audience but not for her. The mimicry trend, she says, began with The Comedy Show Ha Ha Ha on Star One four-five years ago. "It was a refreshing concept. Now that there's a huge market for it, it's caught on like wildfire," Purbi states. Stand-up, Purbi feels, will work in India because Indians have developed their sense of humour. She says, "We've grown more aware, we're smarter, we're more capable of laughing at ourselves. I am for sure."

But spoof specialist Suresh Menon feels we don't "need" comedians from abroad to perform here. Suresh, who walks in and out of get-ups right from the handless Thakur of Sholay to Sachin Tendulkar to a fictitious seedy chat show host, Charan, says, "We have our own stand-up guys and they're doing a wonderful job. Why, I recently watched a Russell Peters performance and I didn't find him all that funny. Arre yahaan se jokes leke America mein perform karte hain and then they package it and bring it back here."u00a0

"The la-di-dah crowd of course will go for these shows and laugh out loud," he adds indignantly.

According to the actor, every Indian is a stand-up comedian. "The funniest guy is Sajid Khan... he makes you laugh till you cry and that too without a script. Then there's Cyrus Broacha. I find him hilarious. He says hello and I start chortling. Raju Srivastav is also fantastic," he says.

Shekhar reiterates: "Raju Srivastav and Sunil Pal are funny all right, but it's all they do. They are like assembly line productions. They haven't learnt the craft of it, there's no emphasis on cerebral academic and intelligent humour in such acts." Almost as a counterpoint, Shekhar points out that a Bollywood actor like Saif Ali Khan has changed the face of comedy somewhat. "He does the whole poker-faced humour very well and his one-liners are funny. Akshay Kumar has also managed to break free of his action image and is now officially Mr Funny Guy. The initial acts that Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan used to put up at the Filmfare Awards were also slightly aggressive, even offensive, but still funny."

Ashish Patil, GM MTV India and Sr VP Creative and Content, says humour is now a huge money-spinner in the country. "Some of the biggest blockbusters in the past year have been comedies." Some of the most popular properties on his channel too have been the funny ones: Bakra, Fully Faltoo, Fully Faltoo Film Festival and the more recent Kickass Mornings.

"Humour has progressed because women have begun appreciating it. They're no longer looking for stud-type guys, they want someone who will make them laugh. That means there's hope for guys like me," says Ashish with a snigger. Sumanto agrees whole-heartedly, "It's the easiest way to sell a product. When your target audience appreciates the comic timing in your commercial, their critical faculties aren't on full alert. They let down their guard and that works for you and your product."

Ashish continues, "Taking potshots at someone, that's the order of the day." The MTV head honcho adds, "Mockumentaries are going to become the next big thing, trust me." Kickass Mornings sees VJ Cyrus Sahukar don 24 different looks. "The trick is to shoot a sequence and make it look like reality when in fact, it isn't. Just like American shows like The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm."

About The Comedy Store, Ashish is positive it will work because he feels the genre hasn't been exploited in India as yet. "We're just recovering from David Dhawan's loud comedy. We could do with stand-up acts and comedy clubs."

But to come back to below-the-belt humour, will Indian audiences be able to laugh at jokes directed at religion, natural and manmade disasters? "Why make fun of religion in the first place? You ought to respect the greater power, not poke fun at it," says Suresh. Vir feels what's funny is funny, doesn't matter which country you are in. The stand-up artiste doesn't vote at all for racist jokes, however because, "they're entirely unnecessary."
Shekhar doesn't endorse making fun of something that a population holds dear. "There's so much else to make fun of. Politics, accents, sportsmen... why our politicians are the best stand-up comedians," he states.
But Purbi thinks whatever

makes an audience laugh is okay. "I'm fine with jokes about my thinness, my fatness, my nationality, religion, the colour of my skin, as long as I get to laugh!" she says. The actress does accept that the average Indian rickshaw-driver or small-town homemaker may not be okay with all of that but retorts, "So what? Why must everything suit the fancies of the majority? We're in a minority but the group which appreciates such humour will grow, I'm sure. Tomorrow if I do a show in the UK, I'll poke fun at them. There's no below-the-belt for me."
Ashish wraps it up with, "Of course there will always be a section that has a problem with 'offensive' humour. I call them HI-positive (Humour Impaired). Don't believe me? You ought to meet my in-laws." Oops! Didn't that cross the line?