“This is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done,” the comedian Vir Das said on a crisp, sunny fall Saturday morning earlier this month.
That most terrifying thing, he clarified, was “working out in front of The New York Times,” because this journalist had decided to tag along for what would otherwise have been his private, routine shadowboxing session with a personal trainer at a hotel gym on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Mr. Das, 46, dressed in an all-black workout set, launched into a warm-up of jumping jacks and high knees while his trainer, Vinny Panza, counted each set.
“Deep breaths, easy stuff, eight more seconds,” he told a focused Mr. Das. The gym was about as unassuming as you’d imagine a hotel gym to be. A few other patrons trickled in to jog on the treadmills and plank on the floor.
“It’s nice to be out of breath and a little bruised,” Mr. Das said after his warm-up, while getting his hands wrapped by Mr. Panza. “It’s good prep for adversity.”
Adversity isn’t a new concept to Mr. Das, who has the unique distinction of having his comedy result in an International Emmy for one set and an official rebuke from the Indian Parliament on national television for another.
He has amassed a vast fan base in India, but his jokes also translate globally, tackling far-ranging topics like Britain’s exit from the European Union (“They ruled the entire world; this isn’t the first Brexit to happen in history, ladies and gentlemen, it’s just the first intentional one”); the Trump administration; and the New York mayoral race (he jokes about how, as a brown man with a beard, he has routinely been mistaken for the city’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani).
This newspaper once described him as embodying “the globalization of stand-up,” and his career has included three world tours in the last four years, with a series of sold-out shows, including recent ones at Carnegie Hall.
He is a Bollywood actor. Sometimes a Hollywood actor, too. A singer in a rock band called Alien Chutney. And, as of earlier this month, an author, thanks to “The Outsider: A Memoir for Misfits,” in which he describes a globe-stretching life that took him from Lagos, Nigeria, where he grew up, to northern India, Illinois, Alabama and back to India, yet never quite belonged anywhere.
Despite all that, it is a roughly seven-minute YouTube video of one of his bits at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2021 that has come to crystallize much of his career arc.
In it, he poetically lays out all of the cultural, political, social and religious dichotomies of India. Each line follows more or less the same format: “I come from an India that has the largest working population under 30 on the planet, but still listens to 75-year-old leaders with 150-year-old ideas.”
Or, “I come from an India where we take pride in being vegetarians and yet run over the farmers who grow our vegetables.” Or, most controversially, “I come from an India where we worship women during the day and gang rape them at night.”
He called it “I Come From Two Indias.”
He didn’t think much of it. He posted the video on YouTube and then headed to New York with his wife to attend the International Emmy Awards, where he was nominated for one of his Netflix specials.
He lost to the hit French show “Call My Agent.” Meanwhile, back in India, where a slide into nationalistic politics has led to crackdowns on dissent, his clip whipped up a storm. It garnered almost seven million views and was picked up by countless news organizations. Politicians filed police cases against him for “vilifying the nation” on foreign soil. One state lawmaker banned him from entering that state. They named him a traitor and a terrorist.
By the time he got on his flight back to Mumbai, there was a very real chance he could be arrested upon arrival.
“My lawyer is like, ‘We’ll see what happens,’” he said. “So she’s on standby. And then I have that conversation with my wife, you know, like, ‘If I get arrested, this is where all the money is, just have this much left over for legal fees. Here’s all my cards, here’s everything, all the logins.’”
He wasn’t arrested, but he and his family received tens of thousands of death threats and they secluded themselves for several months in the beachside town of Goa, where Mr. Das had previously moved in order to escape Covid-19 lockdowns in Mumbai. At one point, he said, he contemplated suicide. All of his film projects and stand-up gigs dried up.
In the midst of the madness, Mr. Das fixated on one aspect of the accusations that he found somewhat funny: That he had embarrassed the country on foreign soil. What if, he wondered, he had said the same jokes on Indian soil?
It is a question that became the genesis for his next Netflix special, “Vir Das: Landing,” which was filmed in 2022 in New York City. In it, his jokes are as unfettered as usual, the only difference being that one part of the stage is blanketed in a layer of sand from a beach in Mumbai. Every time he criticized or joked about India, he would hop onto that part of the stage. It won him an Emmy.
In many ways, the ordeal backfired spectacularly for those who wanted to silence him and instead lent him some cachet, he said. “It molded my comedic voice,” he said. “And it gave me a deep connection with my audience.”
“India’s embraced me,” he added. “I have a massive audience — they just don’t own news channels, you know what I mean?”
Mr. Das started pursuing boxing before the hoopla, during the lockdowns in Goa, and has kept it up since. It became a steadying force in his life. Back in Mumbai, he would have a trainer come to the balcony of his apartment. And when we met, he was in New York for a two-week residency at the Lincoln Center — the first time a comedian has had a residency there — and he had hired Mr. Panza to keep him on track with his fitness.
After the warm-up, Ms. Das moved on to punching and ducking, Then rounds of jabs, crosses and hooks.
“Chin down, fully extend your hands,” Mr. Panza said. “Keep that right foot on the ground.”
By the end of roughly 45 minutes of the pair dancing around each other with quick, sharp moves, Mr. Das was winded, leaning on the weights rack for support.
“Come on, you’re only a few years older than me,” Mr. Panza said.
“True,” Mr. Das shot back. “But I have jet lag.”
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
The post His Comedy Drew an Official Rebuke. He Came Back Fighting. appeared first on New York Times.
