Here Comes the Gentleman Comic

A balding, middle-aged Bengali walks into a bar. But wait. The joke is not on him. The minute Anuvab Pal takes the stage, sporting a white wig and a red coat, you know he is not your average stand-up comic. In an hour-long and relentlessly clever spiel on the British Empire, his latest solo act, he peddles his colonial hangover and leavens the yarn of history and politics with the sharp tang of irony. In Gujarat, even the Gir lions are growing at 12 per cent, he quips, staring into the distance. There is a roar of laughter, then silence, in anticipation of the next story. Performing to a crowd as smart as he is, Pal salts stereotypes with fresh witticisms. (“There are no average Tamils; they either split the atom or smoke cigarettes like Rajinikanth.”) And when he does drop names, they are of the internet age: Jabong and Ibibo, Twitter and iPhone. Even without the somewhat forced references, the small gathering of young professionals at this venue in Whitefield, a modern Bangalore suburb, seems completely in sync with his brand of humour, which goes back and forth in time to create memorable characters. Some of his most effective jokes are so subtle you’d miss them if you blinked: Gandhi made jails sexy, Pal says, and adds breathlessly that comedians may now follow suit. It is a reference, of course, to the moral policing of a gaggle of comics and actors who pulled off a hugely successful, adult-rated roast of Bollywood starlets Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor, only to be forced to pull down edited clips of the show from the internet and apologise to the Christian community for hurting their religious sentiments.

The debate on whether the snarky, sex-laden humour of All India Bakchod— the comedy collective involved—was inappropriate is an entirely misguided one. All comedy is subversive and thrives on gross exaggerations, some grosser than the rest. But is AIB’s ribaldry representative of all stand-up acts in India?

In the beginning there were the mockingbirds. The mimic men shook our TV sets with their silly, harmless gesticulations, their verbal pratfalls and sucker punches, and we laughed right on cue, overcome by the novelty of stand-up comedy and its minor travesties. Then came a more ambitious bunch who declared open season on everyone and their body parts. They found humour in everyday actions, especially those involving genitalia, and spat out expletives we imagined ourselves mouthing.

Their freshly-minted levity, seemingly inspired by comics of the West, sparked a euphoria of irreverence and seemed to represent India Unclenched, or at least its bar-crawling, English-speaking urban youth. If others disapproved, the criticism was all but drowned out by the laugh track.

As these funnymen routinely stole the show at live entertainment venues, a clutch of comics started writing jokes that had nothing to do with sex. They were story-tellers who mined personal indignities for laughs and indulged in a fair bit of disarming self-deprecation. Some attempted social commentary in darkly satirical ways so as to evade the blunt tool of censorship. “I push boundaries in religion, politics and things I feel strongly about. I have to get my opinion across,” says Azeem Banatwalla, 26, who is part of East India Comedy, a Mumbai collective led by Sorabh Pant. “I won’t do sexual jokes because I am not comfortable with material like that, unless there is an important underlying message.” Banatwalla, known as a ‘large words kind of guy’, has had his share of controversy. His sardonic bits about the Ramayana and why Sachin Tendulkar cannot be God elicited a barrage of disapproval—and that is putting it mildly—on YouTube. “As a comic, you have to be a sport about the fact that one lonely boy in Jabalpur will inevitably send you hate mail,” he says.

Last week, Banatwalla worried about a more serious backlash, performing to an audience of about 300 a stone’s throw from where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s infamously expensive suit was going under the hammer in Surat. This was a small-town crowd largely uninitiated into the quirks of stand-up comedy. His cathartic, hour-long show, called ‘Out of My System’, touched upon everything from the ubiquitous mobile phone to advertising, religion, sport and shopping. “To my surprise, the audience just got it,” says Banatwalla. “Clean humour is the most accessible humour, both at the entry level as well as with evolved audiences. It is the young who usually find sexual comedy appealing. And I cannot do a show for 18-year-olds.”

A good joke will make you laugh over and over, while the laughter that follows an innuendo is short-lived, says 32-year-old Shambhu Shikhar, a Hindi comic who first broke into the scene with the Great Indian Laughter Challenge, where he was a semi-finalist. Over 1,500 shows and 14 countries later, he worries about the changing nature of stand-up comedy. “A lot of times, at private shows and weddings, I have had people walk up to me and ask that I take it easy with the abusive and sexual content. They assume that like the majority of comics, I practise risqué humour,” he says. “Humour is about intelligence. Besides, we should keep our audience in mind. An average Indian watches comedy with his family and if we isolate ourselves from that audience, then we are limiting ourselves. Comedy itni bhi cheap kala nahi hai ki aap gaali-galoch karke logon ko hasaiyen (comedy does not have to stoop to profanity to make you laugh).”

The close-knit world of Indian stand-up comics resolutely refuses to be Balkanised into the clean and the dirty, especially in the wake of the AIB controversy. Indeed, many are on the fence, using profanity as the perfunctory olive in the martini. But as stand-up comedy makes significant inroads in the corporate world and in tier-2 cities like Kochi, Mysore and Guwahati, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Indian comic must shoulder the responsibility of less liberal sensibilities. “You cannot hurl obscenities at an audience that is not familiar with stand-up comedy. You risk putting them off comedy altogether,” says Atul Khatri, a 45-year- old businessman and the oldest comic at East India Comedy. “I’d like to use a barrage of bad words on stage, but I am careful not to upset my audience. I play the room.” Khatri is a regular in the corporate circuit and has performed palatable comedy in Jaipur, Gangtok and Visakhapatnam. “Remember that even at Mumbai’s Canvas Laugh Club, arguably the Mecca of Indian stand-up comedy, 30 to 40 per cent of the audience is watching a stand-up for the first time,” he says.

The regulars in the audience, meanwhile, are tiring of comics who won’t give up shoehorning the world into sweeping clichés. They have no patience for Rahul baba’s wisecracks or Tusshar Kapoor jokes, and they turn up their noses at risqué humour without a plot. “Profanity is the least interesting part of the art form. It is a petty detail one mustn’t fixate on,” says Pal, between posing for pictures backstage in Bangalore, a city that he says “gets” most of his jokes. “It is like, after watching Schindler’s List, all you have to say about it is that it had a lot of blood in it. What audiences care about is content.” Consequently, comics are working harder at building stories and characters, writing more material every year and learning from their mistakes.

Death, that moment when a joke bombs and a mournful silence reigns, is a terrifying prospect for any comic, says Rajneesh Kapoor, a stand-up artiste who also draws comic strips. Yet, he gets laughs without seeming like he is trying too hard to please. A good comic, he says, does not succumb to the three crutches—“abuses, a Hindi punch line and using a celebrity’s name”. “It was a personal choice to play it clean,” he says, without chiding the purveyors of a baser comedy.

Biswapati Sarkar, now famous as Arnub Goswami from Times WOW, says he doesn’t choose to differentiate between clean and vulgar comedy. “That’s a call for the audience to make; it is their choice,” he says in a phone conversation from Mumbai. “The kind of things that I do, I have never felt the need to use ‘unclean’ language.” He is part of The Viral Fever, a collective whose parody videos for the internet comment on social mores and political sycophancy with rare candour. TVF’s web series, The Making Of and Barely Speaking with Arnub, are a rage. And it rarely uses cuss words. One of its latest videos is on freedom of speech, a hilarious mock-debate on the limits of artistic imagination and expression. TVF chose to bleep out a cuss word in the video, released in the wake of the AIB controversy. “We didn’t know the kind of repercussion it would have. We have not faced this kind of debate about free speech until recently,” Sarkar says, adding that perhaps a fear has now crept into their creative freedom.

The purpose of comedy is to say the incorrect thing, says Kapoor. And fear chips away at this tenet of comedy, dulling its edge. Rather than bucking under pressure, a comic should gauge the discomfort of his audience and draw the line himself, Kapoor says. This is easier said than done in an age when comics often address an amorphous digital audience. The AIB roast is a case in point. Staged in December in Mumbai, it was attended by 4,000 adults, who gave the act a standing ovation. It was later, when an edited version was posted to the web, that trouble began to brew.

TVF has used expletives before, particularly in its spoof of Roadies, called ‘Rowdies’. “For something like ‘Rowdies’, if we did not use expletives, it would have been dishonest to the script,” says Arunabh Kumar, founder of The Viral Fever. They had to spoof judge Raghu Ram, who uses an arsenal of expletives. Kumar says they use cuss words only if the script demands it and not just for the sake of it. “Most stand-up gigs I’ve attended use cuss words or sex jokes. Today, maa ki, behen ki expletives elicit laughs, but three or four years down the line, audiences will realise that this doesn’t work and they will demand proper content,” Kumar says. “For the Barely Speaking series, we have to ask brutally honest questions and yet not seem offensive. We attempt humour in a manner that is consumable by all.” It was one of the reasons Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal agreed to do something no Indian politician had done before. He appeared on the show and fielded— or at least tolerated—questions from Arnub. A cutesy Kejriwal, seated next to a muffler-wearing likeness of himself from the parallel world of showbiz, bagged over 3 million YouTube views.

“It is a great step forward for Indian comedy,” says Arani Sriram, a 29-year- old hardware engineer from Bangalore who never misses a TVF post. “Perhaps, if comics stopped acting like sex addicts, other Indian politicians would want to participate in a comic act,” says Sriram, who looks forward to the roast of the US President at the White House Correspondents Association dinner year after year. Such a controversial routine is unthinkable in a country that cannot laugh at itself, says Sorabh Pant. “In India, everyone is a deity. This idea, though, is slowly dissipating. Comics are breaking barriers of what people find funny,” he says. Pant is known for his manic, often dirty, humour. Now, he increasingly finds himself exploring political and sociological comedy. “Not all sexual humour is lowbrow,” he says. And much of what passes for clean stand-up comedy is shallow. “Yet, my current favourite comic is the American, Bill Burr, who rages about society in a very evolved way, translating it into biting, hard-hitting humour.”

Comics can be too smart for their own good, Pant says. “If the jokes are too high up there, the audience doesn’t like you.” When his wickedly cerebral act, ‘India vs The World’, where India takes on the US, Nehru on Jinnah, Modi on Bush and Kejriwal on Assange, met with a lukewarm response, he realised there was too much information in it. “It had a lot of politics and history and that kind of crap,” Pant says. “I toned it down in the next draft and it made an absolute killing.”

To laugh over the same witticisms, Freud said, is proof of absolute psychic agreement. In India, we can never seem to agree. So comics unabashedly dilute their material for ‘barely-literate’ Gurgaon audiences, insert innuendo to get libidinous youth and Lions’ Club seniors high, and bemoan the fascism of corporate performances that pay their bills.

A corporate show pays upwards of Rs 60,000, which is almost ten times what a comic earns on a pub night. Of course, it comes with the caveat that the comic must stick to sexless, apolitical humour. Many comics say they find it hugely limiting, yet the money is tempting enough for them to get off their high horse and prepare ‘clean sets’. “Good comedy helps conference-weary executives let their hair down and blow off some steam. But corporates are not the custodians of comedy and have no ambition to be so. They just want safe entertainment,” says Harsh Purohit, founder-director of Cognito, which organises events for companies.

Comics are a side show at these events, which could be induction programmes, client meetings or corporate celebrations. And making a less-than-interested audience laugh isn’t easy, says Amit Tandon, a Hinglish comic. “Most comics don’t try hard enough at corporate gigs, even though it is their bread and butter. Personally, I find them challenging and make an effort to understand the industry, the nature of the job, the language and jargon involved. I don’t just churn out generic jokes,” he says. A clean comic by principle, Tandon believes in closing the wide chasm between existing and potential audiences for stand-up performances. “I want to make everyone laugh. Why limit oneself to a small elite audience?” A businessman and a father, Tandon lives in Delhi and travels extensively. He has toured north India with a Punjabi act called ‘Saanu Ki’ and has had Bangalore software developers in splits over his tongue-in-cheek commentary on pointless apps. The secret is to do one’s homework about things that could interest the target audience, Tandon says. “There was a show where I learned that many doctors were present in the audience. So I joked about how doctors are the only people who, at their own wedding, ask others, kya haal chaal hai. It broke the ice and made them receptive.”

There is a laughter of recognition that a good comic craves, and there is another of irony. The guffaws of crude culture shock pale in comparison. All manner of comedy will, of course, find takers, even if some of them inevitably take it too seriously. But with our growing appetite for satire and high wit, could it be that the next wave of humour belongs to the gentleman comic? As Pal takes his show to Ivy League colleges later this month, Tandon is besieged by requests from Canada for intelligent Punjabi comedy. The whiny dyspeptics who decried the ‘offensive’ humour of AIB have meanwhile gone quiet and we can only speculate on its fate. As Woody Allen would say, if it bends, it’s funny. If it breaks, it isn’t.

(With Shreya Sethuraman and Gunjeet Sra)

Arunabh KumarcomedyGreat Indian Laughter ChallengehumourThe Viral Fever