VIR DAS LANDS ON HIS FEET

Vir Das is perhaps India's most successful comic performing in English, with a long career in stand-up and film. As he embarks on an ambitious journey to Hollywood, the story of how he weathered controversy and found his voice

- Akhil Sood

Around 20 years ago, a motormouth young upstart popped up in Mumbai with barely comprehensible ambitions. Vir Das—Weird Ass, to repeat a now-retired joke he made often—wanted to become a stand-up comedian. To which any reasonable well-wisher back then might have asked: What the hell even is that? No such profession existed at the time. Sure, some of us may have heard of a Russell Peters doing diaspora jokes, and, in fairness, regional comedy has always had a grand old history here, but this was all very new to an urban, English-speaking audience. “The only thing that was around,” he tells me, “was very ‘SoBo (posh south Mumbai), 45 and above, Wodehouse-ian stand-up. Here were kids doing dick jokes, talking about their sex lives, talking about being broke.” It didn’t make sense. Nevertheless, he moved into a small apartment in Bandra and got to work.

Today, Das is one of India’s foremost comedians, someone who fills auditoriums. He plays regularly at prestigious comedy venues across the world. A voice respected, admired, loved (and hated, because that’s how it works). He’s fast becoming a global comic voice. In fact, he was the first Indian stand-up to get his own Netflix special (Abroad Understanding, 2017). Das has tasted success in Bollywood, a star turn in 2011’s cult hit Delhi Belly propelling him to a spot at the big boys table. A burgeoning Hollywood career beckons, with a new show fronted by him in the works. He has just announced a 33-country world tour starting in September.

Through it all, he has been playing music festivals with his comedy rock band Alien Chutney, with some of the most celebrated indie rockers the country has produced, singing comically explicit limericks (often about human anatomy).