Everything's Funny, Eventually

On Comedy, Offence-taking and Bombing Gloriously on Stage

Given this week’s events, it is disheartening to think of the future of comedy in this country, and creative arts in general. I admit I partook in the Ghiblification trend and uploaded cutiefied versions to my Instagram story in order to garner your sweet, sweet likes– until I realized the horrifying implications of it. In that cesspit of X, I saw genocides and atrocities given the look of the very world I once considered the epitome of art and storytelling.

Me sitting with my life-choices

No one indeed has the power to take away the art that we already have. No AI can touch the details of Chihiro’s parents pigging out, the soot spiders scurrying away in Totoro, and the utter, utter devastation I felt at the end of Grave of the Fireflies. The problem– I now see, with my myopia– is people considering whatever bastardization the internet presents to be the definitive version of a particular art. It is akin to future generations thinking of Tanishk Bagchi’s Masakalli as the only one in existence *shudder runs through your spine*. See what I mean?

(Also check out Prasad Bhat’s latest post regarding this. It says everything I wanted to hear.)

Closer home– as if I did not just send Ponyo versions of my family to the family whatsapp group which my mom promptly uploaded to her status, prompting other aunties to ask for the same. Ugh, It’s all a mess– anyway, did you guys hear about the comedy hullabaloo? No, not that one, the newer one. No, not even that one, the newest one. The one which has forever altered Bholi Si Surat in my headcanon.

Park that thought for a slight quick tangent– Thane ki rickshaw… ahem, moving on– I’ve been asked by a friend to conduct a workshop on humour writing. First I laughed at her, then ignored her, then fought her and then she won. I will be doing the workshop if only to sleep at night and not get pestered by the ideas I could present. (This despite the fact that I completely blank out when handed a mic. We’ll come to this later. Park this thought too. Parallel parking, please. We’ve other thoughts coming up the turnstile.)

You could say I’ve been a student of comedy, informally at least. I love it when comedians talk about the process of writing a joke be it through shows like The Green Room, Comedians in Cars, Journey of a Joke or through podcasts where they just riff. Why you don’t have a parasocial relationship with comedians you only see on youtube? Weird.

E. B. White once said:

“Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.”

Wait; that’s not the right quote; rifles through the imaginary notes; Ah; here it is:

Using Kermit for this quote is just evil

• Firstly, it is concerning as to why someone is dissecting a live frog.

• Secondly, I’m pretty sure a dead frog has its uses. Just ask the French.

• Thirdly, I get it.

It is like looking under the hood, learning the magician’s secret, peeking behind the veil to see that the Wizard was a cash-grabbing megalomaniac that was sucking your childhood dry after all. It is knowing that Santa is not real, even for Christian kids. That one was sad.

But I love to do that! And I love to interact with comedians and promote their stuff (Self-promotion five! Park this thought too. You know what? I’ll send a valet. This is getting out of hand!) And I love coming up with theories regarding to what I consider to be funny. And then I thought about what is funny to Indians.

Individually, I'm sure each Indian is good and honest and wants to laugh out loud but then add another person and another, the circle grows, now he has an identity [I say he coz it's mostly men who are destroying habitats (also this is your cue to unpark that first thought. Nice and slow now. We’re not in a rush)]

Now he has to protect his identities, multiples of them. It can be things he is born with—god, religion, caste, race, country, state, city, area, language, parents (his or anybody else's), gender, orientation, diseases, disabilities. I started compiling this list and realized fuck, there is no end to it!

Then add to that the identities he chooses, or the party head, godman or three-legged goat he tries to replace his own father with.

You make fun of anything outside that identity he has constructed for himself, guffaws galore. Inside it, the pitchforks come out. The sweet spot I think is when you veer just outside the comfort zone and still do relatable shit. Posit as one of their own and say this is how we do these things.

Guidelines for Indian comedians to avoid minor inconveniences like mob lynchings

That is where the paradox comes in. See, funny things happen here all the time. We are a really funny country with no sense of humour. Make that make sense.

Even though I have constructed this elaborate theory, I choose to reject it for I truly believe in this age-old formula:

tragedy + time = comedy

And given the infinite nature of time, eventually, everything is funny.

(I thought I had come up with this then I found out it is a David Sedaris original. Great minds and all, you know!)

Interpret this as you wish. Comedy is subjective to market risks, please read all scheme related documents carefully.

Corollary:
This means then that the aliens in works such as Arrival, Interstellar, Slaughterhouse-Five– all beings who experienced time as a physical dimension, saw everything, everywhere all at once, should be, all of the time, just be found laughing hysterically!

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Let’s unpark another thought and take it out to the open road: I just came back from bombing pretty hard at a standup open mic. It was two years since the last time I did one of these and booked the spot this morning on a whim, while I was thinking about the workshop. Turns out, people who voluntarily come to open mics do not want to hear about “The Identity of You” and the rest of the diatribe. Surprising, right?

All evening long I watched other people spew shit I’d heard a thousand times before. The same old rants by the male, IT employee who is new to the city: traffic, roads, girls, boss. Still, I did not bemoan them for they were able to say what they wanted to say, however trite the subject.

Having done this before I was just hoping to go through my points and then I fumbled at the kick-off itself. Completely blanked when the spotlight hit my face and the front row stared deep into my soul. Somehow I blurted some things out but wasn’t getting any laughs until I did my hatespeech on this religion called Cricket and then a self-burn followed saying I’m a United fan.

Accurate representation of Me on stage

On the drive home, I had a gut feeling of wanting to brave the spotlight again. This is when you realize how hard this is as a profession. It is the combined power of the pen, the mic and the stage that creates thoughts that provoke active dismantling from hundreds of hammer-wielding goons. And still, they couldn’t find the way to Tamil Nadu. (Boy, these references would get so old so fast. Just watch this video.)

I do not wish to be a standup comic. I just want to pluck the wild hares running around in my grey matter jungle and maybe, in the process, make people laugh and also face my fears head-on.

Oh and also I’d like to have comics as friends. Speaking of which, time to unpark the last thought and drive off into the sunset:

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Sidequest: Brownpant.com (2023)

The glasses on butts still makes me laugh and I was the one who designed this!

As with everything, this started as an itch. An itch to see all of a comic’s work in one place. I like to think of comics as auteurs. People who dabble in all forms of art and create a varied spectrum of works. Looking westward, my idols in comedy have always been comedians who have been writers and showrunners: Monty Python, Dan Harmon, Larry David, Tina Fey, Donald Glover, the Always Sunny guys, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Lil Dicky, the Broad City broads, Ramy, Kurupt FM and so many more! (Sidenote: throwing this idea out in the wild but I want a site which just shows all of these people’s work in a beautiful manner.)

Then thought of our own folks here. And being a keen observer of the OTT space– in that I have subscriptions to everything…
what do you mean everythi-?
EVERYTHING! –
I had noticed an uptick in the number of comedy specials and web series commissioned by Amazon Prime when it had entered India. I had started Webisoda in 2016 to catalogue this particular phenomena (will talk about that in another post). Recently, as the scene grew exponentially and the work that they put out increased, I found it disheartening to not even find some comic’s information on IMDb, let alone Wikipedia.

So this site that I created almost exactly 2 years ago (on April Fool’s day) does the job of maintaining this archive of their work, specials, shows they’ve created, even books some them have written + their bio. It is their wiki + imdb. It has around 250 comics in the database as of now and is growing steadily.

(The name is lifted from an old joke and I, for some reason, find it funnier to have pant singular. Also denotes our skin colour. I could write a whole million-dollar Pepsi-like document as to all the meanings of the word.)

Check out the man-of-the-hour’s page as an example: Kunal Kamra on Brownpant

To be clear, all information is sourced from the internet. I do not have contacts with any of the comics so do not come hounding at me for an InstaCelebGossip.

Also, I haven’t done anything on the social media front as I find that much more tedious than creating a site and letting it run. But if you want to follow, here is the instagram. It is emptier than a tumbleweed-less desert but I hope to make something like deadant or riffsesh. Love the work they’re doing in promoting the scene.

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Reccs:

It is almost 4:30 am as I am writing this and in this haze, I was just thinking if there are any standup comedians in Pakistan– for as much as their Coke Studio enamours us, you don’t hear about anyone there speaking truth to power (which, granted, is much more difficult there), or chucking yucks in general– and found this really funny set.

Personally speaking, half the references went right over the head but it was hilarious overall. Wish more people from there uploaded their stuff online.

Now our comics know, that if the Go to Pakistan comments catch fire, there are at least open mics there.