The early 2010s saw an explosion of stand up comedy that was different from anything India had ever seen. Did this come out of nowhere, or did we miss the signs? Join us in analysing this interesting pop culture trend on this entertaining episode!

Huge shout out to DeadAnt: https://deadant.co/

Timestamps:

(00:22) Skip Intro

(00:41) Today’s topic - Stand up Comedy

(01:28) Stand up comedy in Indian Mythology and History

(03:00) Johnny Lever and our tastes in comedy

(04:45) Early 2000s - The Star One era - Great Indian Comedy Show and Laughter Challenge (Sunil Pal, Kapil Sharma, Raju Srivastava)

(06:50) Early days of “posh” stand up - Boman Irani, Papa CJ, Vir Das and Russel Peters

(09:29) Vir Das’ efforts in setting the comedy scene

(10:15) The rise of comedy collectives - AIB, EIC, SnG

(11:30) Comedy scenes all around India

(13:00) The mainstream scene - Comedy Circus

(14:00) OML and it’s dominance

(15:00) Flying too close to the sun? AIB’s controversial roast

(17:50) AIB’s Hotstar show and rise of comedy programming on streaming platforms

(21:15) Kapil Sharma’s superstardom, and the divide in comedy tastes inside India

(23:00) Backlash and taking offence - Kunal Kamra, Munnavar

(26:30) MeToo, and collapse of comedy collectives

(28:00) Comedians finding their own niches

(29:38) TV Comedy’s stagnation and future

(31:42) Non-comedians trying out comedy

(32:24) A hopeful future

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This podcast was created as a part of Podcast Lab by India Film Project, in association with Anchor by Spotify.