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Making fun is no fun. www.nihindia.org If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide - Mahatma Gandhi One thing that differentiates humans from the rest of life on earth is our ability of laugh. I believe that even more evolved are the people who can stand up on a stage and make us laugh. I was always a big fan of stand-up comedians, never missed an episode of Jerry Seinfeld. Back home in India, our version of stand-up comic is the hasya-kavi, the funny poet. How can I forget Ashok Chakradhar, Surender Sharma, and Hullad Moradabadi? But that’s the next level of stand-up comedy, to do comedy with a poetic flavor. I definitely can’t match the hasya-kavis but I thought I can try to be a stand-up comic, American style. This is the story of my ordeal. Comedy is no simple matter, it is hard work. Making a bunch of people, who barely know you laugh, is no game. I read somewhere, “To do any kind of live performance, you need to have a strong ego and nerves of steel. To do stand-up comedy, you need to be virtually insane.” The first step, of course, is to mentally prepare oneself. Yes, I do think I can be funny at times, that’s what inspired me in this direction in the first place, but inspiration is not the only thing I needed. After-all, I am no Anu Malik that I can compose music “inspired” by original numbers from someone else. One thing about comedy, it is very difficult to cheat or copy someone. For inspiration I turned to the true adviser of today’s time, Google-bhagwaan. It is amazing how much information there is about comedy. There are many types of comedy- there are observational comedians- Jerry Seinfeld, topical comedians- Dennis Miller, situational comedians- Tim Allen, and so on. While Google gave me some good tips, it also overwhelmed me even further, already I was having second thoughts, and then all this info made me re-think, do I really want to do it? What if I bombed? "The whole object of comedy is to be yourself and the closer you get to that, the funnier you will be," according to Seinfeld. Since he is the one who got me started, I decided to follow his foot-steps. Like Eklavya, I started “studying” Seinfeld, learning from the master. To widen my horizon, I started carefully looking at other major comics of our times. We are living in very fortunate times, all we have to do is to Google and we get more information than our simple minds can accommodate. I developed new-found respect for Charlie Chaplin and Mahmood; those guys were the originals, they started from scratch. Me, I had so many teachers to train me. Listening and watching all these umpteen comics taught me that the best comedy is about oneself. I made a list of all the things about me that are funny, to others, and trust me there are quite a few. The process of collecting material ended up being a soul-searching trip for me. The funny part is that there are things you would never like to talk about normally, but won’t mind when you are trying to be funny. I guess that’s why they say you need to be insane to be a standup comic. I would never have discussed my looks, for example, I am not a good looking guy, looks were never one of my virtues, but that’s the first thing I decided to talk about for my act. Slowly and gradually as I started thinking about myself, I found so many things that are wrong in me, that could make people laugh at me, my dressing sense, my haircuts, my bad English, my life. The trip of self-discovery was turning at times painful. But no one said comedy was going to be easy on me. It’s easy to laugh at others but you need to be really brave to get people laughing at yourself. I admire the courage of these heroes of everyday life, who come on national television and get all the rest of us mortals in a good mood by making fun of themselves and their families, their lives. If I am going to be one of them, I have to be that brave. Then I started practicing, in front of a mirror, while taking a shower. We all know of bathroom singers, I became a bathroom comedian. Lots of time, my wife would come rushing to the bathroom door, hearing me talk to myself and laughing at my own jokes, “Hey, what’s going on? Who are you talking to?” When I told her my intentions “Don’t make me the butt of your jokes,” came the stern warning. I used all my spare time refining my material, trying to find something funny in all that I observed or read. I discovered a new way of looking at myself and at people around me, of course, they didn’t know about it. I became like a spy in an enemy country, observing everything, making private notes and later converting them into jokes. Collecting jokes and practicing before a mirror is not the end of this road to my new-found ambition, it is albeit the beginning of it all. I have a long way to go but the distance that I have traveled already has brought some new insight in me about appreciating all that life has to offer. A great thinker once said, “Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.” I agree. Now I know that great comedians are perhaps one of the most hard-working, intelligent people. Making fun is no fun. Our mind is like a parachute; in order to function, it first has to open. I have come a long way, in my search. While I am nowhere near ready to go on stage, I can definitely say that life is funny. At the least I have learnt to laugh at myself. Now its time to make other laugh at me….
Mukesh Kumar |
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