Last year in March, comedian Vir Das was fresh off the acclaim for Vir Das: For India, his third Netflix comedy special, and all ready to embark on an ambitious 38-country world tour to test out newer material. At that point in time, Das was at the top of his game, “I felt the best I’d ever felt on stage then, and was extremely confident about my material,” Das told me over a phone call.
Then, a deadly pandemic brought an entire world to halt almost overnight, disrupting innumerable plans, big and small, and confining an entire population indoors. Das was no exception. As the borders closed, his tour stood cancelled indefinitely, and he remained quarantined in his Bandra home for the better part of last year.
And yet despite these interruptions, Das, who started 2020 as the only Indian comedian with three Netflix comedy specials to boot, ended the year as the only Indian comedian who now has four Netflix comedy specials attached to his name. Last month, the comedian premiered Outside In, a lockdown special on Netflix shot entirely from the comfort of his study. The special is essentially one of the first instances of pandemic pop-culture, capturing an unique moment in time in real time, its structure more voyeuristic catharsis than comedy.
In between these two specials that bookended his year, the multi-hyphenate artist flitted between several other goalposts. He starred in a spin-off episode of Fresh Off the Boat along with Preity Zinta, created and starred in Hasmukh, a Netflix India series about a murderous small-town comedian, dived headfirst into the universe of YouTube vlogging, sang songs about the coronavirus, raised over Rs 37 lakh for charity through 30 virtual solo comedy shows on Zoom, and then spent a month culling over 300 minutes of footage from those shows to craft an hour that eventually became the special.
It is an incredible, breathless range of annual output for any artist, especially in a year that has pointedly limited the performance of art. There is arguably no other art form that has been so severely dented by the consequences of social distancing than live stand-up comedy. Every stand-up comedian thrives on the active participation of an audience, so much so that the simple act of mining jokes out of interacting with an unsuspecting crowd forms an intrinsic part of their craft. Take away physical gatherings, and you almost render stand-up comedy redundant.
(Also read: With no clarity on 'normalcy' in a post-COVID world, stand-up comedians are resorting to digital intervention)
For a few months, the lockdown did exactly that. Just like taking flights, going to a comedy show (which given the logistics of Mumbai is almost always in the backdrop of a room the size of a matchbox) swiftly climbed the list of health hazards. As comedy clubs shuttered, Indian comedians had no other option but to treat the internet as their stage and Zoom, a video conferencing software that allows up to 100 participants at once, became the preferred playground.
But as it turned out, entertaining a crowd over glitchy internet connections is a whole different ball game than being able to gauge their reaction while they are seated in front of you. For one, it is eerily latent, leaving a comedian with no semblance of control over his own show. If live comedy, like going to the movies, is supposed to be an escape from the real world, then it is significantly difficult for any comedian to make their audience forget where they come from if that audience is inside their own homes. Translated to pixelated screens, the instant gratification of an audience reaction that often forms the coda for a joke, is visibly delayed. Not only does that in turn, affect the delivery of a joke but presumably also the degree of fulfillment that any comedian gets out of being a performer. It is no surprise then that most comedians detest the implication that Zoom comedy shows might become the future of stand-up comedy.
(Also read: 2020 was about praying to WiFi gods, braving the dystopia of stand-up comedy on Zoom, writes Anu Menon)
Das echoes that sentiment too. In one of the confessional moments in Outside In, the comedian deems Zoom shows, considered the “future of stand-up” as also the “prelude to its death.” As he claimed in an interview last year, comedy for him is “a hot room in a dingy basement where it’s sweat and steam and smoke, and the crowd is one foot away from you.” It is also a version of comedy that seems unachievable in the foreseeable future. Yet if there is one trait that is distinctively Vir Das, it’s an innate ability to take things in his stride. Take, for instance, the way he turned the general displeasure around him acting in a crude film like Mastizaade (2016) into a well-oiled self-deprecating joke.
Last year too, Das worked out a way to wrest some sort of ownership over the beast that is Zoom comedy shows: fundraising for charity. Between March and August, the comedian performed over 30 solo comedy shows to raise money during the pandemic. Conducted on Zoom, all these shows began with a 10-minute long unscripted crowd work section, where Das would engage his audience in affable, freewheeling conversations, usually resulting in hilarious outcomes, before getting on with the rest of the show. It began with the comedian asking each member of his audience an innocuous question: What is the first thing you will do when the world reopens?
The answers ranged from the mundane (“get ice cream”) to the heartrending (“be able to go to college in America”). But what piqued the comedian’s interest was the reach of his fan base: these Zoom shows connected people stuck in their homes in Thane, Gurugram, and Gandhinagar as well as London, Moscow, and Poland. As India’s highest-selling English comedian, Das has had no trouble with selling out tickets in the last 15 years that he has been a comedian – his shows have a reputation for being sold out faster than the speed of light. So the fact that the audience he could gather, even virtually, comprised heavily of non-resident Indians and foreigners is a testament to how well he has positioned his brand of observational comedy to cater to Western audiences. The decision to start recording the first 10 minutes (which often made for some really vulnerable moments) of every show that he was doing came soon after when it dawned on him that he had an opportunity to document “a precise moment in time that needed to be nurtured."
Like Nannette, Outside In exists to expand the definition of what a comedy special is supposed to look like. Das understands that Outside In feels more like a documentary than a comedy special but he also knows that is in fact, one of a kind,
“If the secret to comedy is relatability, never again in my life as an artist am I going to experience a situation where everybody in the world is going through the exact same thing at the exact same time.”
Made up primarily of footage from the Zoom gigs the comedian started doing in March, and intercut with moments before and after these shows, where Das indulges his diarist tendencies and offers personal reflections about the state of his mind and the nation at large. Outside In suffers from the same problem as most of Das’s comedic outings, in that, it is funnier when it is not trying to be profound. But it is also impossible to completely disregard these 50 minutes as a time-capsule of the restlessness that the whole world collectively experienced back in March even if March might feel like it happened 10 years ago.
That it found a home on Netflix India even though it feels more suited as content generated for YouTube is further proof of the pull that Das is prone to commanding. It is especially notable considering that Das made up the first batch of Indian comedians, even before social media became an avenue for enabling the culture of stand-up comedy. Das was famous even before the internet made it suitably easier for comedians to find fame. Comedian Sorabh Pant describes Das as the “Priyanka Chopra of Indian comedy” as a way of alluding to the comedian setting his sights on conquering the West. It’s a funny stretch but not quite accurate.
If anything, Das feels more like the Anurag Kashyap of Indian comedy, in that, he has been a crusader, saviour, as well as an introduction to comedy for generations of audiences as well as comedians.
A sizable number of established Indian comedians trace their origins back to working with Das, including Pant. Besides acting in TV and films, Das has Alien Chutney, his own band, and runs Weirdass Comedy, an in-demand comedy consultancy. He’s not a comedian as much as he is the comedy ecosystem in itself. Except there seems to be only one trouble: Where does he go from here?
If the marker for success as a comedian is landing a Netflix special, Das has done it four times over, that too at a time when no one else has been able to crack the code, and more importantly, on his own terms. For instance, Das released Outside In as an exclusive special (it was titled Inside Out then) on his own website in August first before Netflix acquired it. As someone who is currently back to doing physical comedy shows – albeit socially distanced – in India, Das has also cracked the art of turning stand-up comedy into a profitable business.
And yet, it feels like the comedian is still an in-betweener, someone who feels Western for Indian audiences and Indian for Western audiences. If his fourth special proves anything, it is that Das is now at a stage where he has the might to put together stuff that serves himself. Except, it is going to be pointless if he continues to making his voice palatable for a global audience instead of refining his voice in the first place. In the coming year, maybe the real challenges for Das does not lie in landing a fifth special but instead in offering a peak into what it is that Vir Das really cares about.
All images from Netflix.
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