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mid-day turns 40: Is this a revolution?
Updated On: 28 June, 2019 07:00 AM IST | | Anuvab Pal
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
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(From left) Neville Bharucha, Sorabh Pant and Atul Khatri at a session on stand up at CSMVS. Pic/Suresh Karkera
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.
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