DROPPING THE MIC
Stand-up comedy is proving to be a lucrative stomping ground, as a number of the best comedians find that their unique worldview hits home not just on stage but in various other avenues. Nidhi Gupta talks to the brightest talents in Indian art’s most exci
Hey, porn guy!” yells Vir Das at the guy in the green sweatshirt sitting in the front row of the audience at Siri Fort auditorium, for the umpteenth time. “Who’s your best friend in the whole wide world?” The guy points, yet again, to his wife sitting a few seats away (he’d done this earlier when Das asked, “Hey, guy in the green shirt sitting alone in the front row — who’ve you come with tonight?”). “Are you serious?” guffaws Das, “You can’t be pointing her out for everything. Although, on second thought, I do see the wisdom of that!”
Das is making a point about how men and women define best friends. In his latest show, a “scientific comedy” called Battle of Da Sexes (which premiered in Delhi recently), Das shreds the tired adage: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. He goes about it academically, dividing his two-hour set into categories — psychology, business, leadership, history, biology and sex.
Incidentally, for this show, his audience is also divided. The men sit on the left, the women on the right. It is a production quirk that works well because it allows people to laugh at themselves and each other, without worrying about getting into trouble with their “better halves” for having the wrong reaction to a potentially offensive jibe that Das makes.
Das pokes fun at everything and everyone from Hitler to Modi, Manmohan Singh to Aamir Khan, Poonam Pandey to Michelle Obama, himself and the people in the audience. The guy in the green sweatshirt is designated, for the rest of the evening, as “porn guy” because he makes the mistake of announcing his favourite genre of cinema to the world early in the show. It is to porn guy’s credit that he doesn’t take offence at being the butt of Das’ jokes for an entire evening; and to our comic’s, that he can pull this off.
Earlier this year, Das was also at the forefront of India’s first-ever nation-wide standup comedy festival, Weirdass Pajama, in Mumbai. The three-day festival saw over 70 Indian and international comics, performing in English for a particularly metropolitan audience, on stages all over Mumbai. Among the performers were his crew at Weirdass Comedy, as well as the funnymen of All In- dia Bakchod and East India Co. medy — arguably the three largest “camps” in the scene right now. The most outrageous of the many events that made up the festival was Pajama Roast, a sort of “battle of the puns”, where comics and celebrities took potshots at each other.
The festival was a huge success. “We were really worried initially — it was almost like a coming-out party for us com-