BENGALURU: The stand-up comedy scene in the country has picked up since the pandemic and Amit Tandon is taking complete advantage of it. Bringing back his popular show Masala Sandwich with a multi-city tour in India after performing abroad earlier this year, Tandon is presenting everything funny — from relationships other couples have to his relationship with his wife. Speaking to CE, he says, “I wrote this special towards the end of 2019 and then the pandemic hit.
I performed it a few times after and have been travelling with it but honestly, I want to start working on my next set. So, in a sense, this is me performing this now to get rid of it before I start working on the next one!” With a busy schedule up his sleeve, he’s currently on a 12-city tour. He’ll be performing in Bengaluru this weekend.
“I last visited Bengaluru in March where I did smaller shows. I absolutely love performing here. I love that the audience is receptive to comedy and are well-travelled. Since the exposure level is pretty high and people come from all over the place, I don’t have to explain a joke much, which is great,” he laughs. Completing the India tour in the third week of August, Tandon will be starting his world tour in Dubai the week after. “Before that, I want to complete this special and release it on an OTT platform,” he says, recalling that he was one of the first Hindi comics to make it to Netflix in 2019.
“Things have definitely changed since then. We used to see more stand-up specials on OTT before the pandemic. Now the platforms are also quite picky on what goes on it as they want more fictional stories there,” he says. However, social media has been a great platform for comics to showcase their work. Tandon says, “I personally believe that Facebook works better for me than Instagram. I put out my experimental content there and the response I get is how I decide what needs to be done next.” But it’s not that easy to create content either.
“I keep my eyes and ears open for anything around me. Whenever I feel like there’s a material I can work with, I e-mail that pitch to myself in a specific format. I segregate it on my drives and once I’m ready to write, I just rant about it. I do trial shows which give me an idea which joke works and which doesn’t and how I need to improve them,” he explains.
Having said that, stand-up comedy isn’t the only type of content Tandon works on now. He’s currently working on an OTT project where he’s writing a comedy series about the partition. “I feel like every time we see works about the partition, it’s always a sad story, but there are so many other things that have happened. So, I’m working on bringing that story forward. I also have a few other movie projects where I’m working as a consultant,” he signs off.