How to tickle a comedy club
I checked my smartwatch. 130 beats per minute. That's fast for a heart. Maybe my watch was wrong. The comic on stage was winding up when I felt a hand on my shoulder. “You’re next, all the best,” the host whispered in my ear.
There was some applause as I took a deep breath and my name was called. My feet moved on their own, like an obedient dog. I muttered a silent but agnostic prayer---I had to uphold my philosophical leanings.
I fished out my cheat sheet, an old habit from writing engineering exams. On my way, I thought it would be funnier if I admitted to having one and told a story about it. I was going to start my first attempt at stand-up.
That’s when I had an epiphany. This was not a win-lose situation. This was a shoot-and-see-what-happens one. I felt calmer as I turned around to face the audience. The silence was loud. Oh well…
The backstory
I think of myself as a reasonably funny guy, and so I readily volunteered when I was asked if I would prepare for a month and do a stand-up comedy show.
You’ve seen the Dave Chappelles, Ali Wongs and George Carlins. You are invested to the point of arguing with some mule-headed friends why Dave is the GOAT (well, Greatest Of All Time), why Bill Burr is not a misogynist and why you cannot take offence after laughing at a joke. You are not Will Smith-ing this!
The premise is straightforward — you tell jokes and people laugh. But it is one thing to be funny and another to be funny when everyone expects you to be funny.
Being a full-time comic is not easy. Open mics are common in Bengaluru, but so are open-micers. To stand out from that sea of humanity is no mean task. Just the thought of moonlighting as a comic sounds exhausting — finding open mics, doing shows, running around the circuit on rainy Bengaluru nights.
I had a window into the world, being friends with Ramya Ramapriya. She was in Amazon Prime’s ‘Stand Up Shorts’ special and was part of ‘Comicstaan Season 2’. Her YouTube clip has over seven million views.
So I asked her to be my Dronacharya. She said ‘yes’. After I did the show she did admit it was difficult to give objective criticism to a friend who was not a comic. She didn’t hold back though.
Ramya works out her jokes in front of the audience. She told me I shouldn’t think about connecting jokes. The laughter in the hall was the break. It was great advice because, having written for a living for so long, continuity was innate, and I would have driven myself up the wall with it. This is a different art form.
What followed was two weeks of talking to myself — in the kitchen and toilet and on the commute. Incidents on the road sparked ideas, an example being morons on wheels. Perhaps I could bash the ‘Fast & Furious’ franchise? I could talk about Vin Diesel, whose appeal confused me. I wanted to stay clear of sex jokes.
Three weeks out, I recorded my set and sent it to Ramya. It was 17 minutes long, with lots of hmms and ahhs. Her feedback was precise: ‘Set up the joke faster. Fit it for a five-minute slot.’ She pointed out the bits she found funny and had potential. She told me about exaggerating for comic effect and not being afraid of emotions. “Lose control when you have to,” she said.
So I went hard on the ‘Fast & Furious’ franchise and Vin Diesel and compared him to everyman in Kerala. I had angrier material but I had to edit it out because of time constraints.
Blind trial
I had tried telling jokes to my partner, who was a willing, if stone-faced, audience, so I gauged nothing. She was encouraging but more worried about me being on stage than I was. I think she was worried about what I might say, having heard me tell inappropriate jokes to my friends. A couple of my friends were constructive with suggestions. The second recording, three days before I performed, was eight minutes long. I had to cut it but Ramya said I had progressed.
Choosing the comedy club was a challenge. I wanted it to be a comedy club where audience come purposefully for good laughs and not some restaurant that likes to serve food and drinks with a side of comedy! Just BLR fit the bill. It was walking distance from my office in Bengaluru. I got myself a slot for an open mic with minimum fuss.
Just BLR does open mics four days a week. I opted for a Wednesday because my upbringing has taught me that Wednesdays are auspicious for no reason other than Tuesdays are bad. My mother is full of such inane beliefs which I’m alarmed to know I carry on to this day. I once slept on the floor of my old empty apartment for five days because my mother was adamant that I move into my new fully-furnished place on a ‘good day’.
The hardest part was keeping the date and venue hidden from my colleagues. As a glass-half-empty guy, I believed I was going to bomb. Everyone told me I was going to bomb. So failing in front of a familiar audience was not such a great idea. But I had to keep one of my colleagues in the loop and she turned up at the show to make sure I did what I said I was going to do. No fake news at DH!
I reached the comedy club early to catch others performing. Sachin, a young comedian, told me he was out on the streets asking people to attend the comedy show for a fee that I think would not dent anyone’s budget. Sachin’s hustle proved fruitful.
Eye on the clock
Namit Jain, who runs the comedy club, educated me on etiquette. I had five minutes. They would flash a torch at the three-minute mark if I was tanking. If it was going well, they would do it at the four-minute mark.
It was showtime!
Where’s the light?
I had a dozen people who had paid to listen to me, plus comics who were performing and hanging out. And the more I talked, the more at ease I felt. A few laughs came my way, that helped.
As I neared the end of the set, I didn’t see any flashing lights. I knew my set had not been poor. In my newfound confidence, I decided to riff a bit on stage. Comics in the house were kind in their feedback. My colleague told me a woman found my performance “good”, especially for a first-timer. But as I sat down, a friend asked: “Why didn’t you stop when they started flashing the lights?” “Because they did not!” I said. “They did,” Ramya confirmed.
The next day I checked the video and noticed I was speaking a lot faster than normal. I made a note to talk slower next time (I think there is a next time). But I had done over seven minutes! Blasphemy! I called Namit and apologised. I had not seen the light flashing while basking in my seven minutes of fame. He was sympathetic. Repeat this, and you will be banned, he said.
Can you imagine how difficult it is to keep anything secret in a newsroom? I was confident now and showed my colleagues a video of the show. They were impressed and kind.
I had taken a peek into a sub-culture that is brutal and pure. Standing on stage with a mic feels powerful. You can make strangers like you. That is as close to a superpower as you can have.
PS: If I had super powers, I would use them selfishly.
Gags that got the most laughs
* ‘Fast & Furious’ is a superhero movie franchise without the costume budget — Vin Diesel wears a banian!
* When we were kids, dad locked up our phone and said, ‘Everyone you love and need to speak to is right here next to you.’ So now I don’t call him because I’m here.
* In our Hindi exams, they would ask us to write an essay on ‘Mera priya khel’ (My favourite game). We didn’t want to lose marks so we wrote about ice hockey. Neither we nor our teachers knew what it was.
Ramya's feedback on my performance
"Most newcomers find it difficult to pick topics but you were good at choosing stories. The 17-minute recording you had sent the first time had good stuff that could be reworked. Your rewrite was better and what you did on stage was a surprise. You got decent laughs. If you want to do it again, only some polishing is required."
From open mics to Tv specials, standup comic's journey
Ramya Ramapriya took a leap of faith back in 2016 when she decided to take up stand-up comedy as her path.
With Western comedy becoming more accessible and commonplace in India, the idea of just talking and
being funny was something that appealed to her.
“Before that, in India, it was mimicry and other such stuff with a lot of energy on stage and that was not something I would do. So when I saw people stand and talk, I felt I could do it. I wanted to try it,” Ramya says.
It took her a long time to build an audience and put up shows. It seems comparatively easier to break into the stand-up comedy space now, with the cultural acceptance. But when Ramya started, it was a whole other world.
“I went to the Bangalore Comedy Festival and did one small course. I did not understand anything but I met a lot of open-micers. I watched them and started doing it,” she says. “It was tough for six months to a year and then I sort of grasped what comedy was and how to write it in my way,” she adds.
It is important for a comic to have a personality. It’s that personality that drives the comedy. Bill Burr would not have been half as funny had he not created this persona of an angry Caucasian man. Being a woman, there is yet another layer to it.
“Starting is difficult unless you have help. But you don’t really get a mentor, because no one wants to invest time unless they see you are in it for the long run. A lot of people come and do it for fun, take pictures and put it on dating apps and stuff. You get help gradually but by then you also have understood what skill level you have,” she gives a glimpse into the world.
When she started out, 10-12 people would line up at venues in Bengaluru to perform open mics. It has climbed to 15 now. “We used to go and write names for our participation at 4.30 pm because it was on a first-come-first-serve basis. Then comics started going in at 2 pm. So we had to be at the venue from 2-8 pm just to be able to perform for five minutes! They tried to regulate it but the list became curated,” she recalls.
The venues have increased almost threefold, she says. But many come and go. Female comics have increased, with some places hosting ladies’ nights.