NEW DELHI: Facing a live audience can be nerve-wracking and there are moments when punches do not land perfectly but popular stand-up artiste Biswa Kalyan Rath believes people are more forgiving than the one cracking the jokes.
The engineer-turned-comic, who shot to fame with ‘Pretentious Movie Reviews’ online along with Kanan Gill, says stand-up acts are full of hits and misses.
“Nobody remembers your unfunniest moments like you do. They remember your funniest moments.
“In a live show, if a joke doesn’t work, you get used to it very fast. In the first six months of doing comedy, you’re like, ‘It’s the end of the world’, but then you realise the audience is very forgiving. They’re waiting for the next joke. And then when the next joke is funny, they forget whatever happened earlier,” Biswa said in an interview.
The comedian said when a joke misfires, their is always a better way to make a comeback.
“You always have a back-up joke. So if the previous joke didn’t work, you say something like ‘Today the audience is funnier than the comedian’ or something,” he adds.
But writing comedy is not easy as it takes drafts after drafts to come up with a five-minute-long crisp content.
“Normally, we start writing at the end of the year, we put together the best we’ve done, put it out, and then the next year we start again. It’s like five minutes a month. So then, you have an hour of material at the end of the year,” he said.
Biswa said before doing a stand-up act comedian hone their jokes at open mic sessions, the joke has already been done at least 50 or 60 times before it reaches the live audience.
“By then, you know all the variations of the joke. We don’t just come on the stage and do the show. We do a lot of open mics, all comedians do around three open mics a week with 10 or 20 people and keep trying that joke until it’s perfect.”
Biswa believes the explosion of new-age comedy owes a lot to the internet as it has helped aspiring comics to not only find their voice but also create an audience.
“Earlier, you went to festivals to get your face shown. This used to happen 20-30 years ago. Then you hoped a TV producer will pick you up and put you on TV and then you get famous.
“With the internet, there’s an audience for everybody, so I’ve noticed that if you put out five or six videos and you’re funny, you’ll gather an audience. With the internet, the fan base is distributed across the country. But you have to keep them engaged, you can’t do five videos and then disappear for five years.”
Biswa has teamed up with a group of fellow comedians to judge a reality show “Comicstaan” for Amazon Prime Videos, which also streams his special “Biswa Mast Aadmi” and the webseries “Laakhon Mein Ek”, which he created.
The contestants for the show have been chosen from around the country and they finalised 10 from each city out of over 800 entries.
Besides Biswa, the judges of the show are his frequent collaborator Kanan, Kenny Sebastian, Sapan Verma, Kaneez Surka, Naveen Richard and Tanmay Bhat.
The show, which will be hosted by Abish Mathew and Sumukhi Suresh, starts streaming on Amazon from July 13. (AGENCIES)
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