World Laughter Day: Stand-up comedy in regional languages, a distant dream?

The last time you attended a stand-up comedy in Delhi, which language did the comedian speak in? It would have been either English or Hindi. Some of you might have been lucky to get a laughter dose in Punjabi. But, beyond that, though one might hear jokes on different ethnicities in India, there are no stand-up acts in regional languages such as Gujarati, Tamil or Marwari — even though Delhi has a sizeable population of people speaking these languages in the Capital.

One obvious reason, according to a comedian, is that the audience wouldn’t want to learn a regional language just to attend a comedy show. “[Similarly, a comedian] might be a native of any place, [but he] won’t be learning [a new language such as] Tamil or Gujarati to cater to his audience. But, there are Gujarati comics, who are based out of Gujarat and come to Delhi to do shows and there are Tamil comics, also, who come out of Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad to Delhi for shows. Similarly, when I go to Chennai, I do stand up for my Hindi audience there,” says Delhi-based comic Jeeveshu Ahluwalia.

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But, comedienne Vasu Primlani gives a more profound reason: “The tradition of stand-up comedy is a western phenomenon [and] not an Indian occupation, and started with English. What would have come out of India is hasya rasa (comedy). But, the concept of standing in front of an audience and delivering jokes is the closest we’d come to that. Traditionally, it was Jaspal Bhatti who did sketches… If you look at the history of comedy in India, you had the first dedicated space for comedy at The Comedy Store in Mumbai, and that was a branch of The Comedy Store in London. Initially, they would only hire English-speaking comedians. Then, slowly this got caught on with the Hindi populist and Hindi comedians came up. So, since the temporal progression of this occupation was from the West down, the penetration into the regional languages hasn’t been very strong.”

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There is, however, an untapped market for stand-up in regional languages. “I feel there is a good market there, which hasn’t been explored. Right now, it is difficult to do a ticketed show in Delhi and be able to fill-up a 100-seater auditorium by doing stand up in a regional language. But, this will not be the case in the years to come because the audience will not be as generic as it is today. Once stand-ups start performing in their regional languages, and people start getting to know them, they will start following these performers, and will come for their shows,” says stand-up comedian Appurv Gupta, who is from Uttar Pradesh, but was born and brought up in Delhi.