Finding India's funny bone

The stand-up business in India is roaring, even going global, despite challenges

- VANITA KOHLI-KHANDEKAR

“Comedians are the anthropologists of life,” says Nikhil Madhok, head of Indian originals, Amazon Prime Video.

Watch Zakir Khan’s stand-up act in Tathastu or Mann Pasand on Prime to experience that. Khan’s take on relationships, parents, bosses, friends and their foibles delivered with trademark everyday humour resonates at a deep philosophical level. So does his poetry. Not surprisingly his live shows sell out — whether in Sydney, London or Pune.

In August this year he became the first Indian comedian to headline a Hindi show, Papa Yaar, at the Madison Square Garden in New York with an audience of 15,000 people. A few weeks later in October, Papa Yaar had 60,000 people walking in over just two days (and 4 shows) in Delhi. “That is a music festival level of audience,” said Preranaa Khatri, chief business officer, OML which manages Khan among 30 other stand-ups. It is. “When Martin Garrix performed in Mumbai earlier this year as part of the Sunburn Arena Tour, the stadium show sold out to a crowd of 50,000,” confirmed Karan Singh, CEO, Sunburn, one of the world's largest music festivals.

The only other Indian talent in the same league is the Emmy award-winning Vir Das, who has performed at every major venue across the world, sold three million tickets over a decade of performing live, and has seven specials on Netflix besides a whole other life as an actor and now as a director.

Khan and Das are the superstars of stand-up comedy — the ones who can fill up large venues across the world. Then come Amit Tandon, Aiyyo Shraddha, Anubhav Singh Bassi, and Samay Raina among scores of others. If, as popular storyteller Roshan Abbas puts it, “humour is the safety valve in the pressure cooker of life,” then stand-up comics surely are the operators of those valves.