The Outsider, page 20
Sure, Bollywood is a crazy place full of loud characters and handsome men in silk shirts dancing with gorgeous women on a beach as massive fans blow their hair around. It’s about exaggeration and excess, but mostly it’s about that family who saves enough money to go to Gaiety Galaxy on a Friday to see something magical.
The stardust is changing, but the magic is still very real.
A SHORT DOSE OF GROUNDING
In Chicago, when I was totally broke, I lived with Josh and another roommate named Adam. I would steal orange juice and shampoo from them because I couldn’t afford my own. I’d have to measure the last level their juice or shampoo was at, make a mental note, and then fill it up with water to get it to the starting point. One day, Josh bought me shampoo. He said he’d rather do that than wash his own hair with soap water.
CHAPTER TEN THE DEVIL HANDS YOU A MICROPHONE
Vir at the Kennedy Center. Vir performing outdoors during the pandemic in Goa. When you’re feeling like everything is going amazingly well, that your career is blowing up, and that nothing can stop you and all your dreams are on the verge of coming true—that’s usually the moment the devil comes for you. Apparently, this is what Denzel whispered in Will Smith’s ear during the commercial break at the Oscars when Will Smith had just asked Chris Rock to keep his wife’s name out of his fucking mouth and slapped him in front of an audience of millions. The problem with this is that Denzel only appears after you fuck up, and I think we all need a Denzel to show up before we fuck up. Hindsight is Denzel-20.
I got slapped in front of millions of people, metaphorically. This has happened a few times.
The first time was 2016. I was touring around America because Bollywood was over for me. I had just crashed and burned with a massive studio sex comedy called Mastizaade. I think I was so ashamed in my own mind that I convinced myself the rest of the world felt the movie was awful too. To most people, a movie comes and goes, and if an actor does a shit movie, it’s not an unforgivable offense. But the actor has to be able to forgive themselves, which is hard to do in my case.
I had decided maybe American entertainment shores were worth exploring because I had legitimately fallen in love with stand-up again. Here’s how that happened. I spent five years doing movies and shooting during the week and doing maybe one stand-up show on the weekend. The show was called History of India VIR’itten. It was a chronicling of Indian history through stand-up. It was a great show, with a massive run. The problem was, history doesn’t change, and so my material didn’t change for five years either. The young people came and went, the journalists came and went, the hipsters came and went, the comedy crowd came and went. I was just performing for rich old people. At my two hundredth show I remember looking out at the crowd and realizing there wasn’t one person below fifty. Every single comedian who worked for Weirdass was doing edgy solo material, they were in a comedy collective, or they were YouTube stars. I had become Cats the Musical. I was the guy who made jokes about history, and therefore soon would be.
I was signed by an American agency that saw a YouTube clip of History of India VIR’itten. I was in L.A. taking meetings, and I happened to do a spot at the Laugh Factory on a Tuesday night. My friend Raj Sharma, an amazing second-generation American Indian comic, hooked it up. He’d done my comedy festival in India a couple times and crushed. I remember watching comedians talk about shit that happened that morning in the news with an edge that I was wholly missing. I recognized that edge. I used to have that edge, and I had just let it fucking slip to do jokes about Mountbatten for five goddamn years. Shame on me for ignoring the stage, giving it up for trailers and the back of an SUV, for phoning it in when I could’ve been doing this.
I deserved to bomb that night, but I didn’t. I went up between Whitney Cummings and Dane Cook. I did seven minutes. I killed with utterly shit material. I improvised something about the new Twilight movie. There were 180 people, sweat down my back, nervousness in my entire body, lens flare, stage dust. I realized how much I missed it. It was like making out with an old lover. We just knew each other’s moves. The owner of the Laugh Factory, Jamie Masada, took me outside after he saw my spot and said, “Buddy, buddy. You got it, buddy. You’re gonna be a star, buddy. I wanna sign you, buddy, and manage you.” I smoked a cigarette in front of the marquee thinking, “If he only knew I wasn’t going to be a star.” I was a fallen one. He offered me three more spots that week. When I came back the next night, my name was on the marquee. My second spot, on my second night in American comedy, and I was on the marquee. Some comics at the Factory were supremely pissed at that.
But in the tradition of how my career has gone this whole time, I’d decided I was gonna try to make it in the U.S. and get good at comedy again. This would take being away from India, cutting my own celebrity ego down, really getting my feet wet, and learning what Americans found funny.
To do that I needed context and common ground. I couldn’t go up to small crowds in America talking about Bollywood movies. So I resigned myself to being on the road in the U.S. for a few years. I was doing shows in places like Arlington, Texas, which was good practice as far as seeing if my humor would translate with an international audience. Also, I kind of liked the freedom that it offered from the trappings of Mumbai. If you’re not careful, Mumbai can convince you that you need more. A stylist, PR, a manager, an agent, an acupuncturist, a social media manager. It was so good to be free of that. Once in a while my reps would call and say, “There’s a movie…,” “You wanna do a shoot for this magazine?,” “GQ best dressed wants you to…”
“Nope. I’m in Charlotte, North Carolina.”
“Why the fuck are you in Charlotte, North Carolina?”
Because it’s not Mumbai.
Sometimes even a largely Indian crowd would show up and look at me with the same confusion. “You’re in Bollywood movies. Why the fuck are you in Arlington?” This was back when the only metric we Indians could comprehend for success in showbiz was Bollywood success. Thank god that changed.
On the road, I got to go grocery shopping, walk around, be anonymous, take a train ride. It started to feel like I was getting material from everyday life, like I did in the early days.
I have struggled in America twice in my life. This, the second time, I chose to, on my own terms, which is a different vibe. You squeeze every drop of juice you can. Now you’ve got a credit card. When the one-year America run was done, my manager, Reg, and my agency hooked up a solo showcase at the Hollywood Improv. That walk over from the Uber to the Improv is interesting. On your right is a brick wall with a massive mural that has Robin Williams, Pryor, Carlin, Jim Carrey, and more. The marquee says: “TONIGHT—VIR DAS—SOLD OUT.”
The crowd was made up of Very Important People from Hulu, Netflix, and HBO, all trying to determine whether or not I was worth their time and money. There was a magical crowd that night who helped me through the set, and ironically, Imran Khan, who was visiting L.A. with his then wife, Avantika, was there. It was a great show. I remember finishing and meeting all the agents, and shaking a bunch of hands, and then I was by myself with all that adrenaline. One of the downsides to my profession is that you go from ten thousand people to utter silence and adrenaline that has no place to go. I remember calling Imran and Avantika and asking if they were still up. They had rented a small house near Melrose in West Hollywood. Their daughter was asleep and they were in their pajamas when I walked in, looking lost. Avantika warmed some pizza up for me and sat me down and said, “You don’t get it. I saw the looks on their faces. Your life is about to change, and I am so happy for you.” It was cold out. No one tells you L.A. gets freezing cold. The pizza was warm, though.
The next week Netflix offered me a comedy special.
It was the first project Netflix U.S. green-lit out of India. I remember every single representative I had saying, “Go into the meeting and take whatever they give you, whatever venue and budget, since it’s your first.” I asked for a two-city special shot in a stadium in Delhi and a basement in New York. Basically triple the cost. Netflix said yes.
Cut to six months later and I am standing next to Conan O’Brien, who, if you’re a comedy person, you know to idolize way more than any other late-night host. He’s funnier, and has done more for underdog and unique comedians than anyone else on late night. The same week the special comes out, I get six minutes on Conan O’Brien’s show, which actually gets me more attention than the special (no offense, Netflix). A late-night spot is a tricky thing. If it goes well, maybe your career will go well. If it doesn’t, your career is definitely over. It’s four minutes that you shoot at 4:00 p.m. and then agonize over until it comes out at 11:00 p.m. It all goes by in a flash, like an out-of-body experience.
I was subtly told that if it went well, Conan might walk over, and if it went really well, I might get invited to the couch to sit down. All I remember is this. They asked me if I wanted a hand-held mic, and I arrogantly said no. Because something about doing that felt like a club, not late night. Then I went up onstage and did four minutes like a blithering idiot who had an invisible microphone. If you look at my left hand, by force of habit it is miming holding a microphone that isn’t there. Without the microphone my body language has a strangely 1940s German vibe to it, like I’m telling jokes but thinking of the Fatherland. I have no clue how the set goes, but I’m getting laughs, and then Conan O’Brien is walking toward me. As he gets closer I realize this man is six foot four. When he stands next to me, we look like a pencil and a sharpener inside a stationery box. I look like Frodo to his Gandalf. Then I am walking toward the couch because he has invited me over. I sit down, we cut to break, he shakes my hand and says, “That was great. I mean it. Really, really great.” I got escorted back to my greenroom. I waited three hours in there for him to get off work so I could take a selfie. It was pure fanboy energy. Indians all over America were like, “Our guy made it!”
That kicked off about three years of touring and being welcome at most comedy clubs in the world, which turned into smaller theaters. I started enjoying it more and more. Which means I started focusing on India less and less. My material became less about India too. I kind of became this “outside guy” in Mumbai, where I had lived for more than a decade.
And then the pandemic sent me packing for home, and changed my voice completely.
During the pandemic my wife and I relocated to Goa. That move became our way of life, and it changed the tone of my comedy forever. No clubs were open for a while, and I felt like I had just found some sort of comedic momentum. You know that phase in the gym where your muscles have memory, you’ve done enough reps, you’re seeing just a hint of a six-pack? I felt loose. So when the world shut down, I was not having it. Plus, my dog, Watson, who you will meet very soon, was not well and needed a change of scenery. We were these North Indian outsiders in a tiny village called Parra in Goa. I found a venue called Omaggio, where an Israeli-Indian dance troupe had a tiny stage in the forest. They used to do trapeze work from trees. I’m no trapeze artist, but I’ll take the stage. I bought a mic and two speakers on Amazon. I would hike up in the forest with a speaker and do stand-up for small crowds, outdoors. Fifty people, socially distanced, who really just loved comedy enough to hike up a hill at 2:00 p.m. I filmed the shows and turned them into a series called Ten on Ten, with ten episodes that lasted ten minutes each, on ten different topics. All topics that were on people’s minds in India.
We were in the middle of the pandemic, and India had the worst second wave anyone had ever seen. Death numbers were being faked, everyone was raging about vaccines, and everyone just had this open vulnerability to them. What was I going to do? Shallow jokes about dicks and going to the gym? We’re on a hillside like some cult. This had to be real. My voice became more political, something I had been afraid to do so far in India. I’m not an idiot, and I read the news. Ask any Indian, and they will tell you this new government isn’t a fan of comedians. I personally think that the benchmark of a truly secure leader is their ability to tolerate satire. The government and I have a very clear difference of opinion on that. It’s no secret that satire can get you into trouble in India. Even people who support the government treat it like a shortcoming they can live with. “Yeah, they’re bad with comedy, great with policy. What can you do? Just play ball.” But in a pandemic, where everyone is locked indoors and law enforcement is too busy to worry about jokes (as they should be), you don’t necessarily have to play ball. I’m not a YouTube star. What I do know is that by being on Netflix you miss out on a massive young audience that loves comedy.
The Goa shows got younger people paying attention to my comedy. They changed my audience and my voice. I crowdsourced the topics, so there were episodes about cancel culture, religion, and freedom of speech. We talked about god, the government, patriotism, Covid, censorship, and more for a crowd that was sorely missing that kind of discussion. It felt good to say it, openly—literally out in the open. But there was no place to rehearse this material. It would go up online raw and unrehearsed. So there was an ease to it, and it never came off as performative. It had to be real and flawed. By this time, I was three Netflix specials in with Abroad Understanding, Losing It, and For India, and a few YouTube videos changed everything.
When the world opened up, tickets went faster than they ever had for me. Eighty percent of the audience was now between the ages of eighteen and thirty. I could fuck around, play, be loose. We announced a massive tour with flagship venues. It all sold out. And then, the devil came.
In 2021, when the world opened up and comedians were unleashed again, I went back on the road. I was high on a recent Emmy nomination for the Netflix special For India. I was in Hyde Park in London enjoying the September gray and we got tagged in this nomination for best comedy. A package arrived from Netflix CEO, Ted Sarandos, the next day with a two-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne and some accoutrements. We decided to play good karma and leave it under a park bench for college kids to find. I put a post up on Instagram and left. Our next stop was a sold-out show at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. All of this is to say, I was feeling pretty good, pretty confident.
I was critically acclaimed, newly viral, and too cool for Ted’s booze.
Then… the devil came. Where were you, Denzel? Where were you?
Shivani and I headed to D.C. the night before the show and settled into the Watergate Hotel (maybe an ominous sign?). We did some monument tours during the day, and then headed back to the hotel to prepare for the show that night. On the day of a show, I typically nap in the late afternoon (this is part of my prep), but that day I only slept about thirty minutes. I don’t usually write a show a few hours before, but I’d been thinking of a “Two Indias” riff for several months. The pandemic really brought the disparity in India into sharp relief: You had migrant workers and farmers dying and suffering, and then prominent families who were definitely not having that same experience. It was hard to ignore the privilege you had and what that meant relative to others. Now don’t get me wrong, this is something that we are only too happy to ignore on a daily basis. Mumbai is a dichotomous city where people sleep on the street outside a nightclub and everyone seems to go about their lives like that isn’t the case.
If nothing else, the pandemic was a time when people spoke up about how they felt about their country. Not just in India but globally. From farmers’ protests to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 to Black Lives Matter to Boris Johnson. People were talking, and people stuck at home were listening more than they ever had before. So you just walked around more conscious of where you lived, and maybe you walked around abroad feeling homesick. I’d been off tour and in India for two and a half years. Being on tour again was different. I missed my country, my dog, the hills, the forest. Groggy from my nap, with all of this on my mind, I wrote a set I decided to do after the show at the Kennedy Center in about twenty minutes, and called it “The Two Indias.” It came out of me in a flow state, if you will.
When I read it out loud to Shivani, I asked her if I should actually do it. If you haven’t watched the show, the format was “I come from an India that does x, but I also come from an India that does y.” One aspect would be horrible, and the other would be redeeming. It was about the complexity of the country, but I also wanted to call out bullshit. In its purest intention, the show was designed to make us remember the light that we are capable of, that the positive flip side is still there, even though for over twelve months it had felt lost.
I thought of it as a love letter to India, an India that I felt was fading in the pandemic. I tried to end it on a positive note. “I know that India still lives…” I wanted a big ovation for India.
“Sure, you should do it,” Shivani said. “What could go wrong?”
We headed to the Kennedy Center, ready to put on an amazing show. It wasn’t the first time I’d done a show that questioned things about India or called out privilege. Despite what some people later came to believe—that I used an opportunity handed to me at a great American institution to disparage my country—it’s still a regular theater that charges rent, and while they are very picky about their programming, you will find more than the occasional dick joke onstage at the Kennedy Center. It’s not the United Nations. I hired a wedding photographer to film it, the only guy available on a Sunday in D.C., for four hundred bucks, so I could put it online later. It wasn’t some vast conspiracy. It was just me, doing my work. Or so I thought.
