 "Vir Das, Zakir Khan")
“Comedians are the anthropologists of life,” says Nikhil Madhok, head of Indian originals, Amazon Prime Video. Watch Zakir Khan’s stand-up act in Tathastu or Mann Pasand on Prime to experience that. Khan’s take on relationships, parents, bosses, friends and their foibles delivered with trademark everyday humour resonates at a deep philosophical level. So does his poetry.
Not surprisingly his live shows sell out — whether in Sydney, London or Pune.
In August this year he became the first Indian comedian to headline a Hindi show, Papa Yaar, at the Madison Square Garden in New York with an audience of 15,000 people. A few weeks later in October, Papa Yaar had 60,000 people walking in over just two days (and 4 shows) in Delhi. “That is a music festival level of audience,” said Preranaa Khatri, chief business officer, OML which manages Khan among 30 other stand-ups. It is. “When Martin Garrix performed in Mumbai earlier this year as part of the Sunburn Arena Tour, the stadium show sold out to a crowd of 50,000,” confirmed Karan Singh, CEO, Sunburn, one of the world's largest music festivals.
The only other Indian talent in the same league is the Emmy award-winning Vir Das, who has performed at every major venue across the world, sold three million tickets over a decade of performing live, and has seven specials on Netflix besides a whole other life as an actor and now as a director.
Khan and Das are the superstars of stand-up comedy — the ones who can fill up large venues across the world. Then come Amit Tandon, Aiyyo Shraddha, Anubhav Singh Bassi, and Samay Raina among scores of others. If, as popular storyteller Roshan Abbas puts it, “humour is the safety valve in the pressure cooker of life,” then stand-up comics surely are the operators of those valves.
Much like the Indian Premier League or Bigg Boss, stand-up comedy has created a new genre of programming over the last decade. From streaming to shorts and large stadiums, this genre has become a huge part of entertainment. It brings in around a third of all views on YouTube, significant viewership on pay-services such as Netflix and Prime Video and is one of the fastest growing parts of the live events business.
Of the estimated 90,000 live events in India in 2025, about a third were comedy, according to informal estimates. “In just five years, the typical audience size has expanded from 50 to over 5,000 attendees per show. This growth is not limited to the metros; Tier-II and -III cities have embraced live comedy with equal enthusiasm,” said Anil Makhija, COO, live entertainment and venues, BookMyShow.
There is no proper sizing of the revenue stand-up generates. A back-of-the-envelope estimate based on tickets sold at live events, ad money stand-up gets on streaming, shorts, television etc and the money stand-ups make to create reels, puts the total at about ₹1,500 crore. It doesn’t seem like much in a ₹2.5 trillion media and entertainment business. But it is roughly half of free-to-air television, one of the fastest growing parts of the media industry. Or about a third of what music earns in India.
How and when did telling funny stories become big business?
The boom
Hasya Kavi Surender Sharma, comedians Jaspal Bhatti and Johnny Lever and writer P L Deshpande were the earliest versions of stand-up comedy in India. In 2005 came The Great Indian Laughter Challenge on Star One. Over four seasons it showcased comics who performed for the audience and a bunch of judges. Many of them — including Raju Srivastava and Kapil Sharma — went on to become big stars in their own right. When YouTube entered India in 2008, several migrated to the platform. Around 2014, stand-up comedy popped as a genre on YouTube which then spent a lot of time and effort nurturing it. A virtuous cycle was being created.
“From 2010 to 2015 onwards we started managing a lot of comedians. That is when our comedy roster became bigger than our music roster. Brands started wanting to work with stand-up comics because they had so much following on social media,” said Khatri of OML which manages 30 comics including Tanmay Bhatt, Biswa Kalyan Rath, and Kannan Gill. In 2012 collectives started getting formed. AIB or All India Bakchod with Bhatt, Rohan Joshi, Ashish Shakya, and Gursimran Khamba was one of the earliest. Then there was East India Comedy with Atul Khatri, Sorabh Pant (both of whom left), Sapan Verma, Angad Ranyal, Azeem Banatwalla and others.
“All these people started creating a lot of fun sketches (videos of 12-15 minutes each) usually shot in our office. Then they would put them on YouTube. Kanan and Biswa’s (deliberately) pretentious movie reviews started getting a lot of traction. In the process they were creating a bunch of IPs (intellectual properties) or show formats that could be sold to platforms and TV channels. That is how we got On Air with AIB, on (then) Hotstar in 2015,” says Khatri. That helped because ticket sales and brand integration were the only ways to monetise till then — and the numbers were not huge. At best a brand would pay a couple of lakhs for the engagement that stand-ups were getting online.
In 2016, the big global streaming platforms Netflix and Amazon Prime Video came into India.
“The belief (then) was that if you want binge-worthy shows, crime and thrillers are easier to do. But the ecosystem was not geared for it. It had to shift from 500 episodes for a TV show to an eight-episode series. The time from idea to screen could be anywhere between 2.5-3.5 years,” says Madhok.
While it was still figuring out the ecosystem, Prime noticed that stand-up was doing well among younger audiences. It latched on to the genre — both for reach and to bridge the time it would take to develop a proper crime series. For stand-up comedy the gap from “idea to launch is probably six months. We did about 14 comedy specials. Comicstaan (2018 onwards, 3 seasons) was a real game changer. There was the One-Mic Stand (which invited celebrities to do stand-up, 2019 onwards, two seasons),” says Madhok. Both of these were created by OML. Prime Video now has close to 70 exclusive stand-up comedy specials from 50 of India’s best comedians including Khan, Kenny Sebastian, Das, and Rath.
The next growth spurt came with the “boom in social media from 2018 and the pandemic. People were on the phone all the time and content consumption was at another level,” says Shoven Shah, founder and CEO TribeVibe Entertainment. This BookMyShow subsidiary produces youth and college entertainment shows and is also the producer of Das’ Mind Fool tour and Khan’s recent 60-city tour with Papa Yaar.
Can the laughter stop?
Shah reckons that stand-up is at its peak now. What bothers him is “there is a lot of supply of events in music or comedy. This could affect ticket prices.” Roughly a third, maybe more of the ₹1,500 crore stand-up made this year comes from ticket sales. The price of a ticket could range from ₹150-6,000 or more, depending on the talent, venue and other factors. Those numbers are three, maybe four times as much for international shows. So that is very good money. There are other challenges like the lack of good venues.
But the biggest is the constant worry about someone taking offence, breaking up or raiding a venue or, worse still, a police case — a real issue with stand-up comedy today. Das was labelled a traitor and terrorist after his Two Indias show at the Kennedy Centre in the US in 2021 rubbed some people the wrong way. It meant cancelled shows, dealing with the law, and various lumpen elements. The other worry — in an ecosystem with only a handful of stars, how do you churn out enough fresh material to keep the audiences coming.
That is taken care of with the deluge of talent coming in from across languages. Shah has been checking out fresh voices in Bengali and Gujarati among other languages and is bullish about growth. So is Madhok, who says, “For us to be invested in a genre over eight years is because we see a lot of traction. It is not just limited to younger folks like earlier. The repertoire of consumption for all our audiences has expanded and stand-up has become an important part of what they like on the service.”
Keep laughing, India.
