The Outsider, page 16
At some point one of them sat me down and said, “So you wanna be a VJ?”
“Not really. I really wanna be a stand-up comedian,” I said.
“Oh fuck, bro. You should leave. Stand-up comedy in India? No future, bro.”
Thanks, VJ Yoda! Did they teach you that at the tight jeans fitting? Trust a VJ to be so enthusiastic about VJing that they think no other profession is possible. But in his defense, there was no comedy scene in India at that time.
Despite the handful of shows I’d done in Delhi, it wasn’t like Jon Stewart was knocking down my door, asking me to work with him. Once I started the job, I learned very quickly that being a VJ is not an easy gig, especially not for a comedian. As a VJ, you’re supposed to be upbeat and enthusiastic about whatever song or topic you’re told to discuss, whereas most comedians are natural skeptics who are born to question, call out bullshit, and make people laugh by not being positive and upbeat about stupid crap. “Guys! The next song is totally awesome and I love listening to it when I shower! Oh my god, I’m so pumped about it!” Being a VJ was like being an influencer without influence. It was like having a mental disorder called Overly Enthusiastic Syndrome. Think about it, you’re in a tiny room in front of a green screen screaming your guts out to a single camera. This, while a producer who went to film school and a cameraman who wants to make movies both look like they want to kill themselves. You announce a song, rave about a song, pay homage to the song… and then the song doesn’t play… you pause for three seconds and then react to the song that didn’t play. It’s insanity.
But there I was, standing in a tiny television studio looking into a camera, with no audience to ramp up the energy. They made me wear a sleeveless shirt even though I had zero muscle definition, which is a physical failing that producers have pointed out to me in front of film crews on numerous occasions throughout my career. A producer actually arranged for fake temporary tattoos to cover up my arms and make me look cool, to which my response was “JUST GIVE ME A SHIRT WITH SLEEVES!!! HOW ABOUT THAT???”
I was terrified and very clearly not good at the gig. Also, why was there so much gel in my hair? I could cut glass with each spike.
The show was called Ek Rahin Vir, which loosely translates to There Once Was a Vir. Even my supposed future was titled in past tense. It was a bad sign.
I faked it every single day, which is probably why they fired me after four months of pretending to love “Hey Shona” from the movie Ta Ra Rum Pum or “Ain’t No Other Man” by Christina Aguilera. So there I was, back in my 230-square-foot hovel, my room with no view. Now I was not just an unemployed grad school dropout, I was an unemployed grad school dropout who’d just been fired from a fucking VJ job.
Mumbai gives you opportunities, but they may not always be the right ones. Tim Robbins had to wade through the shit pipe to get to the cleansing rain in The Shawshank Redemption, and this was very clearly my shit pipe. I also learned that I’d signed a shit contract.
Kids, listen to Uncle Vir for a second. Hopefully you move to Mumbai or New York or Los Angeles and someone offers you a dream job. But when they do… READ YOUR FUCKING CONTRACT. With a magnifying glass. And lawyers. And a red marker to circle the shit parts.
I had signed an exclusive noncompete contract with The Times of India where they owned me for five years, during which they would pay me each month. But if I quit that contract early, I owed them about $53,000 USD.
If I ever quit, they owned me, my jokes, my blood, my organs, my firstborn child, and the birthmark on my right ass cheek. So I was fired, but not exactly. The boss told me, “We’re gonna continue to pay you, but put you on ice for eight months until we can figure out what to do with you.” When I protested, he reminded me of my contract. Dick!
I had been in Mumbai long enough to know that eight months “on ice” meant artistic death. The VJ show was crap, and thankfully no one had really seen it, since I didn’t last very long and the channel was new. Maybe if I went back to washing dishes for another sixty-seven years I could pay off the money I owed them and finally be free!
I lamented this to Swara. She said, “Even if they give you another show, it’s not going to be funny. They don’t know funny!”
And she was right.
I asked the boss for a meeting the next day.
I sat in this powerful, fifty-four-year-old man’s office and said, “Look, I can be on ice for as long as you like. I’ll take the money. But when I come back, I may not be funny. It’s possible I’ve forgotten how to be funny. Maybe everything you have me do is deliberately unfunny. Maybe it sucks. Maybe I just can’t figure out how to make it good. Maybe I’ve lost my talent by the time you put me back on TV.”
The smile that came across his face very clearly stated: “Well played, young Das.” He knew exactly what I meant. Don’t waste money on me. I’m not gonna play ball. Let me go.
He hugged me, and then he officially fired me. I was unemployed, free of my contract, and thrilled.
There’s a lesson here for all artists: As long as you hold the talent, you hold the power. The best they can do is try to bottle your talent, to get it out there. But only you can make that happen, and they know that, which means you ALWAYS have leverage when it comes to your art. Don’t forget that. Don’t get put on ice.
* * *
So what could I do next? Where the fuck did I belong? It sure as hell wasn’t on a show where I sported fake tattoos and spiked hair and went home to camp VJ. Also, no disrespect to Christina Aguilera, but no amount of Shakespearean training or Russian method acting coaches could make me good enough to seem genuine and honest about loving that song.
I loved Jon Stewart (still do), and this was at the height of his reign at The Daily Show. I figured, I like to tell jokes, I’m politically engaged-ish, so why not try to be the Jon Stewart of India? And how did I accomplish this? With a Handycam, of course.
While I was VJing, I was still doing stand-up in Mumbai at night, so I had some material. I took my Handycam and went to my old debating partner, Ruksh’s, house. He was now a journalist working in Mumbai. Ruksh from DPS Noida, the most principled man I knew, fellow debater who had listened to my bullshit for years, married Karishma from DPS Noida, my other closest friend from high school. The head boy of DPS Noida married the head girl of DPS Noida. Achievement married achievement, and all these years later, they were still dealing with their clueless friend’s bullshit. We used his dining table, rented two lights, and made a cardboard cutout of a show background, which I called The Indian Excess. I put the camera on a tripod, turned it on, sat down at the kitchen table, and shot an episode of my pretend Daily Show–esque pilot. We spent all night editing it. It looked like a home video, but we thought it was the shit. I took that pilot into the office of every news editor who would see me, and I hit play. Some had seen me at the Times Food Awards, so they knew I could deliver. Out of those meetings, a lady called Vandana Malik gave me a shot. What was it with powerful Indian women taking chances on me? I owe them my career, I swear. I was offered a job on CNBC in India, doing two minutes of jokes every night on a television show that was watched by the entire country, including the prime minister. I was twenty-five.
My first TV gig was four months of obsolescence, and my next was four years of prime time.
I had gone from an outsider washing dishes, to an outsider in Alabama, to an outsider inside a tiny studio with one camera, to a lonely comedian in a newsroom with five hundred journalists running and screaming and shouting at each other to make the 9:00 p.m. show happen. A newsroom is the most electric, chaotic atmosphere you can imagine. Where else will you find five hundred people running around passionately screaming about their country?
“The textile minister just announced!!!”
“The attack has been claimed by…”
“Arjun is having an affair with…”
“There’s an additional tax levied on…”
VJ Yoda’s head would explode in that room.
Even as the joke man, I had to work with urgency. We would film my segment at 4:00 in the afternoon, which gave them enough time to edit it and then slap it on the 9:00 p.m. bulletin. Every night at exactly 9:56, after a commercial break, the anchor would say, “And to close the night off here’s Vir Das with ‘News on the Loose’…” and my segment would play. Working in that environment, I learned what news truly means to people, what an anchor really does, how they have to pivot live, how they deal with brand-new, sometimes tragic, information. I was sitting in a studio waiting to do jokes when India won World Cups, when terrorists attacked Mumbai trains, when politicians resigned, when actors died by suicide. I heard all of it with the same earpiece, from the same control room as the anchor.
One day Swara left her office in Churchgate and told me she would meet me at home in Bandra after my filming. I knew she took the train. I was doing my segment when Savio in the control room got in my ear and said, “Vir, there’s been a terror attack. Stay in the studio, we will do your segment later.”
Two anchors rushed in and started doing the news with what little information they had. I was in a corner and couldn’t cross cameras to get out. Bombs had gone off on the train that Swara was supposed to be on. I remember listening to the control room as a producer said, “Gaurav, there’s one more blast…” Then he’d anchor some more. “Gaurav, stand by. One more blast…” I watched this man masterfully take information in and deliver it in a way that wasn’t stressed or disrespectful. When they cut to some full-screen footage, I was able to dash across the studio and call Swara. She hadn’t left her office yet, but the train that had blown up was the one she took every single day. The next day after the attack, we still did the jokes. My producers Suresh, Venkat, and Natasha told me it was important to make people laugh in the face of tragedy. Good lesson. It was an incredible place to work. I was like their odd adopted child, and I learned so much from the anchors about professionalism, integrity, and the fact that even in dark times, the show goes on.
When the music for my segment played, I would appear on camera sitting at what looked like a child’s desk in the corner of the news studio. I would be drawing circles on a piece of paper, which was something I blatantly stole from Jon Stewart. I’d open by saying, “Welcome to News on the Loose, my name is Vir Das… and that’s the bad news.” And then two minutes and twenty-five seconds of jokes until it was time for five seconds of closing music. Basically, it was an open-mic set, with new material every day, watched by millions, five nights a week. It was exhilarating.
The segment was a huge hit. It finally felt like my work meant something. It got to the point where businessmen and politicians would call up the channel and ask us to do jokes about them to soften their reputations. It also meant that my audience was old as balls. None of my fellow twenty-five-year-olds were watching CNBC at night; they were getting high and enjoying Mumbai. Since the show was watched by every businessman in the country, I started getting booked to tell jokes at corporate gigs. Money was coming in, so my attitude became: Is there anyone else out there who likes watching Pryor? Carlin? SNL? Thinks that jokes can be made about more than onion prices and GDPs? Maybe jokes about dicks and VJs? They had to be out there. I knew there was an audience. I had seen that in Delhi, but in Mumbai I was cut off from them.
The disparity between my on-screen act at CNBC and the jokes about my life that I was doing live couldn’t have been larger. I remember once I was in Kolkata at a car launch doing thirty-five minutes for automotive journalists. In the middle of their afterparty, in a nightclub with blaring music, they stopped the music and threw me onstage to tell jokes. I bombed hard, worse than the car that was discontinued a year later. A lady in the middle of my set screamed, “Why? Why are you doing this?”
I stopped and responded, “Uh, madam? I’m being paid to do thirty-five minutes.”
“No, I mean comedy. In general, in life.” She got a solid laugh. That made one of us. I knew I had to find a young audience, and soon.
So much of those early years was people not knowing where to put me or what to do with me. I remember my first foreign gig. I got booked to play in Dubai for 22,000 rupees, so about $275. I was going to do comedy at a Daler Mehndi concert. In case you’re not aware, Daler Mehndi is a massively popular Punjabi singer. Bhangra is the fastest-paced music in India. Punjabis are the most violent, passionate dancers in India. You dance with a heart rate of 230 with every part of your body. None of this lends itself to thoughtful pauses and witty jokes.
I needed to buy a laptop, and I was told they were cheap in Dubai, so off I went. We were at a huge outdoor venue in Dubai, packed with twelve thousand people. I was to do five minutes in the middle of each of Daler’s kurta changes, of which there were six. I was also to bring on three “item girls,” who were beautiful women that would dance to pop songs. One of them was Negar Khan. This is what led to my first-ever appearance in a Mumbai newspaper.
I bring Negar Khan onstage, and she is dancing (as “item girls” do) with a hint of disinterest. Maybe her thoughts are also focused on the laptop she possibly wants to buy in Dubai. Then a sweet engineer-looking kid climbs up onstage and starts to dance three feet away from her. Dubai security is notorious for running on some vicious cocktail of anger, protein, and steroids, and they slapped the kid twice and chucked him back into the crowd. The crowd lost their goddamn minds. I was then sent out to calm them down. Because that’s what an angry Punjabi crowd that has been drinking since dawn on concert day wants most—a terrified comedian with hacky, unpolished material.
I came out and yelled, “Hey, guys, what is up with airline food?”
And twelve thousand people yelled, “FUCK YOU!!! WE WILL CUT YOU UP, BASTARD!!!”
“Er… You ever notice the curtain between first and business class?”
And twelve thousand people screamed, “FUCK YOUR MOTHER!!! SEND OUT DALER!!!!”
Now I was starting to tear up slightly. “You ever notice how women talk too much and guys don’t listen?”
And twelve thousand people raged, “MEET US OUTSIDE, BASTARD, WE’RE GONNA KILL YOU!”
Eventually I gave up and just said, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back Daler Mehndi.”
I was escorted out of the venue, put back in my hotel, and didn’t get paid. I arrived in Mumbai to a headline in the city tabloid that read, NEGAR KHAN GROPED BY FANS IN DUBAI BECAUSE EMCEE VIR DAS FAILED TO CONTROL THE CROWD. THEY WERE RESCUED BY DALER MEHNDI.
Once again it struck me. I needed to find my own audience. Soon.
I needed to find other crazy people who were my age, not wearing suits and talking about the budget deficit but wearing jeans and sneakers and talking about balls and heartbreak. It would take me two and a half more years, a flop movie called Mumbai Salsa, being in the background of another movie called Love Aaj Kal, quitting my job at CNBC, and finally getting cast in a very big movie, Delhi Belly, to start my own company with some comedy friends, in a city that was hungry for a laugh.
We called the company Weirdass Comedy, because that’s how Americans pronounce my name. Vir Das becomes Weirdass in America. I’m proud to say it was India’s first-ever comedy company, as far as I know. It was a collection of pure idiots, potheads, and rejects who thought there had to be something funnier out there than some of the shit we were being subjected to on TV and film. I had just been cast in two movies, one being Delhi Belly. In the middle of making Delhi Belly, I called to the set the only two funny people I knew in Mumbai: Kavi Shastri, who is still my creative partner today, and Sorabh Pant, a young writer I knew on News on the Loose. Kavi and I had met as background extras on a movie called Love Aaj Kal, and Sorabh and I had been in the trenches together at CNBC. The day I called them to the Delhi Belly set, I had been shaved bald and dunked in cement.
The three of us stood in the heat inside a tent at the Film City studio complex (think the Warner Bros. lot on steroids), and I said, “Let’s start finding other funny people. Let’s do an open mic like I used to do in Chicago. I’m done doing jokes for old uncles.” And then I went back on set and got dunked in cement again.
When Delhi Belly eventually wrapped up, we did Mumbai’s first English-language open-mic comedy event. We called it the Weirdass Hamateur Night, and it was at a spot called the Blue Frog. The Blue Frog was THE indie music club in Mumbai. They typically had rock shows, until I came along. The owners gave us a Monday night, as you do with shitty gigs that are expected to attract no one.
The first night, ten comedians showed up to perform. If you’ve ever been to an open-mic comedy night in L.A. or Chicago, you’ll know you might get twenty audience members, nineteen of whom are dating or related to one of the unknown comics. On our first night, 350 people showed up. That’s how novel stand-up comedy was in Mumbai. I’d learned a few things since that show in Delhi where I used flowerpots to hide my cue cards, but I was still an amateur. We all were. For example, we had no concept of how actual comedy clubs notified a performer when their set was about to be over.
Usually there is some system where a light is flashed, so you can panic while thinking to yourself, “Oh fuck, I have two minutes and I’ve only gotten through half my set.” Instead, I used the stopwatch on my phone to keep track of each person’s set, and when time was almost up I took a metal spoon and banged it on a steel plate, like some DIY gong from hell. It was the least subtle system you can imagine. I would ring the gong/plate and unintentionally scare the shit out of each comedian. We did that for six months before we realized there were better, gentler, less startling ways to run a comedy show.
