BENGALURU: Chirag Jain, better known as Papa CJ, has done hundreds of shows ever since he turned comic in 2004. So, it’s hard to believe that the ‘funny’ man, who is able to keep a room full of people in splits, fears being lonely.
"Standup comedy is a lonely profession. Your idea and point of view are judged every 15 seconds, and if people don’t laugh, you know you are failing. It’s different in movies, where there are stakeholders. Here, you’ve got only yourself to blame," says Papa CJ, who was in the city for the release of his book, Naked.
The 42-year-old admits that he’s quite young to write an autobiography, but when the publishers at Amazon saw his show, Naked, and offered him free Prime membership if he wrote a book based on the show, CJ though the offer was too good to refuse.
"I also felt that the medium of print would give me the opportunity to create a richer experience for my audience by including anecdotes from life and layers of emotion that a standup comedy stage would not allow me the luxury of," says the former consultant who holds an MBA from Oxford.
The book, published by Westland, is an easy read since CJ had imagined his reader sitting and having a drink with him while narrating his story. "Even those who read very little will find it very easy to get through," says CJ, who wrote the book in three 10-day stretches, each six months apart.
CJ has been very frank in his book, sharing difficult moments, including not having been able to meet his son in the last seven years post his divorce, with equal ease as his fun school and college memories. But used to sharing his life’s experiences and being publicly vulnerable on stage, CJ says his stage show, Naked, helped him open himself up in ways that he never thought he would have the courage to do.
"Yet while doing that, my audience was still in the room in front of me, where I could see them and if need be, adapt my performance, to effect some degree of control over how they processed what I presented. With the book, I didn’t have that luxury," he says, adding, "An autobiography is a daunting venture for a first-time author because not only will readers judge the quality of my work, they will also be judging the quality of my life. Add to that, I have tried to be as honest and vulnerable as I can be in a medium that I have little experience in."
Ask him if he was under pressure to be ‘funny’ in his writing, and CJ points out that for a comedian, that expectation is always there. "In fact, I resisted the comedian’s urge to force-fit gags into the narrative. While they could help punch it up, I didn’t want them to take away the flow of the story," says CJ, whose number one challenge was self-discipline.
"Motivating someone who can get on stage, tell his story and get instant gratification from his audience, to write his story down in book form is not an easy task. So if anyone think it’s a crap book, that’s entirely on me," he adds.