BENGALURU: Making people laugh out loud may seem to come naturally to Shankar Chugani, but there was a time the standup comedian feared facing crowds; he talks to City Express about revealing his insecure side in his latest video, Bheed
As the manager of front of house at Jagriti, Shankar Chugani, who shot to fame with Comicstaan, once came face to face with cops when a late-comer insisted upon being allowed to enter the theatre. During a visit to Jamaica to attend his cousin’s wedding, he almost missed his connecting flight from London as he got caught up helping a woman. All of these and more form an integral part of Chugani’s performance material.
A popular standup comedian who watched the likes of Sundeep Rao and Kanan Gill perform and said to himself, “I want to be there,” Chugani had only imagined a life in the performance space as he grew up. However, he wasn’t so sure whether he would be able to pull it off. Not because of anything, but his fear of crowds. In Bheed, a video he recently released on YouTube and Instagram, he narrates his anxiety upon facing large gatherings and the insecurity that followed. “It’s a poem I had written after finishing college when I was intimidated by large crowds. I would be nervous, and this explains how timid and insecure I used to be in a group. Although I had wanted to be an actor growing up, I hadn’t imagined doing stand-up full time,” says the 31-year-old who is currently in his hometown, Coonoor. Theatre and comedy, he has
found, calm him to a large extent.
“I still remember the first time I went up on stage to do an open mic, and I threw up before the show. But a conversation with a popular comic who suggested that I should be myself on stage. That changed the way I looked at things, and soon I felt different when I heard the laughter,” he says. The initial idea was to shoot a video in Mumbai, depicting the concept through a video, and he also shot some footage. But with the pandemic barring large crowds, he decided that a social media release would work better. Speaking of Mumbai, Chugani recalls how peers and mentors egged him to move from Bengaluru, although Chugani resisted it.
“I was trying to do open mics in both cities, and make use of all the opportunities. That was my line of thought. In hindsight, not moving was a good decision. I would have struggled financially and also been stuck in the lockdown,” says the comic who chose to shuttle between Bengaluru and Mumbai.Over the last one month, he has been doing a show called Chaar Log Hasenge (which allows only four audience members to join) – an attempt to get that feeling of going up on stage. “I don’t want online shows to be the future. However, at this point there might not be many options.
But there is a possibility to perform on different platforms. For instance, I requested a friend if I could perform at his house in Coonoor. It was done with all safety precautions in place. So we will have to figure out different methods to perform,” he says. At other times, he does video calls involving friends to bounce off ideas, to hear “organic laughter”. Chugani doesn’t switch off, and thinks of jokes all the time – while doing house chores, completing his daily target of 10,000 steps or his latest initiative of cleaning up the hill station. “I can’t imagine life without being a comic,” he says.