HYDERABAD: Stand-up comedy is slowly moving back to stage in Hyderabad from the now-familiar online live sessions. After eight months, three open mic sessions have been held at The Joint bar and café, Banjara Hills. Toby Thomas has been hosting it and it is organised by Funny Side up Hyderabad. Even though the audiences are thin, the enthusiasm among the comedians to be back where they belong, on stage, is palpable.
We speak to two talented stand-up comedians who perfomed at the open mic on Tuesday.
Varun Karyakarte
Varun Karyakarte, 22, was one of those who performed on Tuesday. Not surprisingly, his five-minute routine included jokes on the recent Hyderabad floods. He says, “I experienced a flood situation for the first time and I thought it’d be funny to narrate a scenario about how I handled it, how people faced different problems and how they tackled them.” And his take was funny. Varun, an engineer by profession, says he was 19 when he first performed to a live audience. “I was introduced to the art form of stand up at the age of 17 and I knew for a fact that this is something I’d love to try, but I didn’t have the guts or the resources to get on stage at the time,” recalls he.
Indian comics Kanan Gill, Anirban Das Gupta, and Sumit Anand are his role models and Dave Chappelle, he says, is his biggest influence. Varun relies on wordplay, double extenders, absurdity and recurring callbacks to make his sets funnier. “Most of my jokes come from personal experiences. They say that comedy is nothing but tragedy plus time, I look at all the tragic incidents in my life and I exaggerate them to make them funny,” shares he. He adds, “I feel that establishes a real connection with the audience.” Varun loves being on stage and during the lockdown, he says, “We went from doing 10 open mics and shows per week to nothing. To keep generating content we switched to Zoom shows.” He says though the “dynamics were different,” it helped to test his new jokes and motivated him to write. “Nothing beats live comedy, there’s no better feeling when you tell your joke to a live audience and you get validated with a wave of laughs,” he asserts.Requesting people to support live art forms in these tough times, Varun’s plan is to “Build an hour of material to tour with to different cities, put out videos on Youtube, write TV shows and do more creative stuff.”
Kirtiraj M
Kirtiraj M, 27, works as a technology analyst at Infosys in the city. While he is fully competent at his day-job, his passion is doing stand-up comedy. His recent act included jokes on iPhones and how stupid he was during his childhood, and he got thumping applause from the audience for his set. He does surreal humour, exaggeration and observational comedy, and stories from his life. He says humorously, “I have been showing my humour to my friends since my engineering days… when they got irritated with my jokes, I thought of taking it to the stage.”Kirtiraj did his first open mic in December 2018 at Barista, Kondapur, and admits, “It took me two months, to make strangers laugh for the first time.” He says, “I write and practice every line of what I am going to say on stage. I have never improvised on stage; I am yet to acquire that skill.” He adds, “I note it if I am thinking something funny while working or watching a movie or scrolling through Facebook. Then I try to write some jokes on that topic.”
With no physical shows for many months, he says, “All of us were really excited and we had a great open mic. This is going to continue unless there is another lockdown.” Feeling confident, he says, “2021 is going to be a great year for comedy, as we are going to unleash what we have written or thought of in the past months.” A fan of Jerry Seinfeld, Louis CK, Bill Burr and Dave Chappelle, his plan is to create more content and do one-hour shows in the next two-three years.
What pulls him towards stand- up? He answers: “No matter how sad you are in your life, you go on stage and make people laugh, that gives you confidence, shows your value in this world, and makes you believe that you are worth something.”
— Tamanna S Mehdi
tamanna@newindianexpress.com @tamannamehdi