Sunday, July 10, 2011

Praveen Kumar - A BITSian Mime

 In a dimly lit but packed bar in Bangalore, the spotlight is on Praveen Kumar, 30, a marketing professional and occasional comic, jokeing about how Malayalam movies are divided into two grades, those with grade A heroines with an average age of 65, and grade B where 65 is the average hip size.

Comedian Praveen Kumar
These stand-up acts are getting much bigger, especially for companies looking for entertainment at client parties or award ceremonies or annual meetings. However, most don't have the patience to make it big because as in show business, money and fame hinge upon the name and the personality, which take time to create. Praveen Kumar stuck around. Even as a student of engineering college BITS Pilani, Kumar was in a comedy mime club. He then moved to humour blogging and then to live acts. At present, Kumar, along with Sanjay Manaktala and Sundeep Rao, has completed 24 shows at Bacchus, a bar and restaurant in Bangalore. The audience is always youngsters who've grown up on sitcoms such as Friends and Seinfeld.


 Being a comic is now serious business. An established comic can rake in anything between Rs 20,000 to Rs 1 lakh for a night's laughter. Stand-up comics such as Vir Das and Kunaal Roy Kapoor have graduated to the big screen, like their older compatriot Boman Irani, while international names such as Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood, of Whose line is it anyway? fame, toured India in 2010 to packed audiences. Even an advertisement for a telecom brand has actor Ranbir Kapoor testing his hand at comic timing. Says Delhi Belly's Kapoor, "A lot of people in Mumbai are trying their hand at being comics, watching peple from abroad come in and improving acts. You can't call it an industry yet but it's not a fad either."

And it's enough for clubs or bars to pay between Rs 12,000 and Rs 15,000 per act. Cover charges are in the region of Rs 500. Performers say it doesn't matter who keeps the revenue from the cover as long as the audience invests its energy in the show.

The trick is in nuancing the act according to the audience, which could be the the jet-setting ceo at a conference or a beer-glugging student at a bar. A stand-up comic has to watch reactions, suss out the audience, improvise, pull them in and let them go at the right time. Stand-up comedy is hard and can be the most humiliating moment of one's life. But if someone gets your joke, then it's worth it.

http://www.facebook.com/Praveenkuka
--indiatoday.intoday.in