PRESS RELEASE
The Man SEPT'11
Section: Cover Story
You're a Weirdass, man!
On stage he’s India’s funniest, most audacious stand-up comedian. We've seen him sport an afro and dance in platform shoes yelling, “Jaa Chudail!” in Delhi Belly. Yet he describes himself as balanced, geeky, and reserved. Vir Das talks to Azeem Banatwalla about his awkward childhood, how anger fuelled his comedy and how stand-up has made him fearless.
Setup
Vir Das does not bask in the glory of being called India’s funniest man. It surprises him. “I’m not the funniest man in the country, no,” he says, “I just have funny ideas.” I’ve watched Vir Das on stage and on the big screen, and assumed that with his cheeky grin and unabashed humour, he would be the life of any party he attended. Wrong. “I’m usually the guy sitting in the corner of the room, observing everyone else. Where do you think I get my material from?” he jokes. More seriously, he adds, “I think everyone has different facets to their personality. The comedian and the joker in me, that’s my stage personality. I talk to 2,000 people non-stop when I’m up there, but I’m not usually so talkative. I’m very reserved off-stage.” Even today, his friends taunt him when they're out for a drink. “They tell me, ‘It’s 11.30, shouldn’t you be asleep?!’ I’ve got a small group of friends who accept me as I am, and I’m thankful for that,” he laughs.
Das was born into a family of civil service officers so his choice of profession was clearly unusual. “We had generations before my dad working for the IAS. My dad became the black sheep of the family when he decided to run a business. So you can imagine what a shock it was when I became a comedian!”, he says. He describes his childhood as “painfully normal” although he travelled a lot, spending several years in Africa. Vir’s family returned to Noida when he was 15, and he remembers being the class geek in school, sitting on the back-benches, buried in novels. “I loved to read,” he recalls. “I was the nerd of the class. Not too popular with the girls, as you can imagine. I was a borderline dyslexic. Terrible at academics, terrible handwriting. I mean, I got a 52 per cent in the 12th grade, man! I was only good with sports and performing arts. I loved taking part in debates at school.”
He may have spent more of his life in Nigeria, but Delhi owns Das's heart. He speaks of the city with an almost fierce affection. “I absolutely adore Delhi, I grew up there, and I feel that the generalisations people make about Delhiites are unfair. The people have the largest hearts, you find the best food, and the prettiest women in the country. I live in Mumbai now, and it’s a very modern city, but I think Delhi is the greatest city in India. It always will be.”
Twist
Das bid farewell to Delhi after school to study theatre at Knox College, Illinois. Thus began the most trying period of his life, which led him to discover the comedian in him. “My course had an emphasis on performance, so I would spend a lot of my time enacting plays,” he says. “After that, I’d take out my guitar and head to Cambridge Square to play and earn money to eat dinner. That’s how it was. But I enjoyed it.” There came a point when simply acting out scripts wasn’t enough and he wanted to be himself for a change. That’s when stand-up reared its head. He recalls, “I was a doorman for this comedy club near my college which had an open-mic every Tuesday night. So I decided to have a go but was booed off stage 15 weeks in a row.” He realised that simply telling jokes wasn’t enough to get people to laugh. He had to find humour in himself and his own life. That's when he finally got it right. “People started to laugh when I decided to talk about stuff like sex, or even taking a dump!” he says.
Although Das jokingly claims to have hit rock bottom about once every month, he found himself in a severe cash crunch after his college life ended. “I worked as a doorman, a dishwasher and a security guard, and that wasn’t to support acting. That was my career!” he says. “After a point, it made me very angry and very cynical about my life and how I couldn’t seem to outgrow my poverty. I thought to myself, 'I’m f*&^d', but I also found it kind of funny. I started doing shows talking about the shit I was in, about my credit card debt. I started putting myself out there, and that’s when it began to come together,” he explains.
Punch line
Das returned to India in 2004 having learnt the formula to stand-up comedy the hard way. He wrote his first show Walking on Broken Das and toured the country with theatre producer Ashvin Gidwani. His humour was bold, which represented a risk with an Indian audience that was not really familiar with live stand-up. But he accepted the challenge. In fact, he revelled in it. And it paid off. Crowds of 500 grew to 2,000 and Das was soon performing to packed houses everywhere he went. “I knew it was a risk, but that’s what makes anything I do fun,” he says. “I absolutely love being the underdog. Stack all the odds against me and I will do everything I can to defeat them.”
Earlier this year Das started his pet project, a comedy rock band called Alien Chutney, to realise a childhood fantasy of being a rock star. Although at the bottom rung of the rock 'n' roll ladder, he firmly believes he can claw his way to the top. It’s just the way he is.
Side by side with stand-up, Das began doing comedy on TV with shows like Is Route Ki Sabhi Linein Mast Hain and Ek Rahin Vir, but he was never really comfortable. “I find it incredibly difficult to be myself in front of a camera” he says, describing how he struggled to conform to the needs of the TV channels he worked for. That changed in 2007 when he began presenting CNBC’sNews on the Loose, making fun of anything that dared to call itself news. He recalls, “I used to spend my time reading seven newspapers a day to find things to make fun of, and the channel gave me license to say what I wanted. I really enjoyed my time doing it.”
That same year, Das found himself a role in Manoj Tyagi’s Mumbai Salsa, a small movie, which didn’t do very well. Nonetheless, it was his gateway into Bollywood. “I had fun doing Mumbai Salsa. I wanted to do more movies at the time, but I had signed a contract with CNBC, so I really couldn’t. I still managed a couple of cameos in Namastey London and Love Aaj Kal.” Das had a clear plan. He intended to keep doing TV and stand-up until the right movie script turned up. In 2010, it did. It was called Delhi Belly.
Landing one of the lead roles in Delhi Belly was not easy. It was the most coveted script in the country. “I guarantee you, every Indian actor capable of speaking English, aged between 19 and 30 has read for Delhi Belly,” he said with a hint of pride in his voice. “I auditioned so many times over the course of the year. The call finally came while I was doing a show in London. It was the script, and I knew it was worth taking a year off from stand-up to do Delhi Belly.” The makers themselves sometimes doubted whether the movie would have mass appeal, but Vir was a constant nagging voice in their ears, saying, “I’ve seen 4,000 people at my shows laughing at this content. If people laugh at it on stage, they will laugh at it on the big screen, as well.” He was convinced Delhi Bellywould be a success, and it is. He jokes about how he hates the Transformers movie franchise.Transformers: Dark of the Moon released the same week as Delhi Belly, threatening to steal Das' thunder. It can't have done too much damage at the box office, though, given the astronomical Rs 21.25 crore for Delhi Belly's opening weekend.
While Das is proud of all he’s achieved, he credits stand-up comedy for allowing him every success he’s had. He emphasises that being a comedian has taught him all he knows. He explains: “When you’re doing a movie you’re pampered. You have a script, you have a director to help you. Believe me, stand-up is the most terrifying thing you can do. It’s just you on a stage, with a microphone and a spotlight, versus 4,000 people. I realised I could do that and it’s made me fearless as a performer.” Perhaps that’s why he had no qualms shaving his head or doing a disco item number in platform shoes and tight jeans for Delhi Belly. “If you had told me four years ago that I would be doing a dance number with Adi Chopra and Farah Khan, I would have said you were bloody insane. But these Bollywood item numbers are really popular man! Everyone calls me chudail now. I’m an item boy!” he says laughing.
Comedian he may be, but Das's love for cinema makes him keen to explore the more serious side of his acting in his upcoming project Raakh, where he’s cast opposite Raima Sen. He calls it his biggest challenge so far. “I had to lose eight kilos, forget I spoke English, and get myself a Bhojpuri accent! It’s totally different from anything I’ve done before,” he explains.
Reaction
Das is surprised with the reception he gets every single day. He now has about a dozen comedy shows and three major movies under his belt but doesn’t allow himself to look back. “Unfortunately, I wake up with 20 ideas in my head every morning. I can’t let myself think about what I have done, because it distracts me from thinking about all that I haven’t! I want to takeAlien Chutney forward, I want to have my own comedy club, I want to do a certain kind of film. There’s so much left to do!” he says. But in spite of his success, Das is determined not to let himself get carried away. He’s managed to steer clear of controversy, although he thinks people don’t expect a comedian to be well-behaved. “As a comedian, you can be found passed out in a trashed hotel room with 75 beer bottles and 95 strippers, and say you’re doing research!” he says with a laugh. On a more serious note, however, he feels he doesn't overdo the indulgences: “I still drive my six-year-old Honda Civic, even though I can afford a fancy car. My house is very simple. I travel first-class, I like to stay in expensive hotels, I buy a new guitar every time I go abroad, and I have a massive library, but that’s about it.”
In 2010, Das started Weirdass Comedy, with fellow comedian Kavi Shastri, as India’s first 'comedy consultancy' firm. Das and his hand-picked group of comedians funny up everything under the sun, from books to television to movies. I ask him if he believes he can make anything funny. He’s modest again, “No, but I do believe that there’s comedy to be found in everything. Humorists in India right now are really old. We need young, talented ones working on movies, scripts and TV shows to create better content. That’s what Weirdass Comedy aims to do.”
Vir Das' career has seen the best and the worst of times. He’s talented, understated and supremely confident in his own ability. From being booed off stages ten years ago, he’s fought back to become India’s greatest stand-up artist. The key to his success he claims, was learning to laugh at himself.
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