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Many people celebrate their birthday with a few friends and family. Zakir Khan, the Indian comedian, celebrated his 38th birthday with thousands of people.
This August, Mr. Khan became the first comic to perform a show entirely in Hindi at Madison Square Garden. More than 15,000 people burst out laughing as Khan thanked people for showing up from far-off lands like New Jersey, and for forking out a hefty ticketing fee. He talked lovingly about how Indian fathers always give advice, want to know your plans for the future or spout facts unprompted.
“Some shows are not just about you,” Mr. Khan said about the significance of the moment. “It’s like that scene in a film where, in a hero’s journey, it stops being about the character and starts being about the good of the whole community.”
Khan is arguably the most popular Hindi standup comic on the planet. He has more than 8.3 million subscribers on YouTube. He recently finished a tour of the U.S. and Canada, performing at big venues with many onstage guests. At Madison Square Garden, the comedian and actor Hasan Minhaj introduced him.
For every show, Mr. Khan asks his audience to wear Indian ethnic clothes. It’s important for him that the Indian diaspora is visible.
“I want us to be seen,” he said. “It’s a celebration of us.”
Many comedians from India are now touring the U.S. and Canada, selling out auditoriums in the Bay Area, Chicago, Dallas and Houston as well as venues in Louisville, Ky.; Toledo, Ohio; and Jacksonville, Fla.
Just two decades ago, immigrants from India would bring a suitcase full of magazines and DVDs and CDs with them to the U.S. These would then circulate among the community so that the children could learn Hindi. It’s one way that the diaspora maintained strong cultural ties to its country of origin. This same desire is now fueling a thriving circuit that has made the U.S. a second home for Hindi comedy.
Indian standup traces its roots to the hasya kavi sammelan, or gathering of satirists. In the ’80s and ’90s, the comedian Johnny Lever rose to fame for his astute mimicry and observational humor. He became a fixture as a comedy act at musical concerts and Bollywood live events, some of which came to the U.S. Lever eventually left standup to work in Bollywood films.
Then the internet arrived in Indian homes.
In 2005, I was among the thousands of college students who watched low-resolution YouTube videos of the Canadian comic Russell Peters’ routine on accents in our dorm rooms. At the same time, a Hindi comedy talent hunt aired on national television. My friends and I watched it in our common room as we ate our allotment of one scoop of ice cream as part of the so-called Sunday feast in our dining hall.
We were India’s first internet generation, raised on an unfiltered diet of George Carlin, Sarah Silverman and Ricky Gervais clips. Sanitized and censored comedy on Indian television just did not resonate with us.
Comedians like Vir Das and Papa CJ, who cut their teeth in comedy while studying abroad, saw an opportunity and started open mic events in cities like Mumbai and Delhi in the late 2000s. Upwardly mobile millennials felt seen at these comedy events, where people just like them poked fun at the government and the annoyances of daily life.
By the mid 2010s, this alternative comedy circuit had launched the careers of many Indian comics, who built followings on YouTube. It also included many Hindi comics from smaller towns, like Khan.
With the arrival of cheap high-speed internet in India in 2016, videos of these comedians garnered hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. People shared these clips on Facebook and WhatsApp groups with their friends in the U.S. and Canada.
When Imthiaz Sherriff, who runs an events company in Los Angeles, saw these videos, he wondered: If concerts could sell tickets, why not comedy? He hopped on a flight to Delhi to see if it was possible.
“We do around 200-250 shows a year,” said Mr. Sherriff, whose company, Oho Productions, organizes most of the Indian comedy gigs in North America.
While their audience skews younger in India, comics are delighted to also see older people attend their shows in the U.S. Amit Tandon, who was among the first Hindi comics to perform in the U.S., in 2017, recalled when an octogenarian came to his show with an oxygen cylinder attached to his chair.
“The people who come in are hungry for their language, their humor,” said Prashasti Singh, one of the most popular female comics in India. She tried doing a show in English once, but her audience told her to stick to Hindi.
Singh has performed at Fringe in Edinburgh, London and Amsterdam, and is preparing to tour the U.S. next year. More women attend her shows abroad than in India, and she loves their raucous energy. “It’s like the Bangalore or Gurgaon audience on steroids,” Singh said.
Many Indians in the diaspora are people who could afford to move to the U.S. for graduate school or a job. They adapted to America’s culture and norms and are successful in their careers.
But, like these comics, they also have families in India with diabetes or high cholesterol. They also have uncles who spread unhinged conspiracy theories on WhatsApp, or aunts who share unscientific health advice.
Comics can reflect the diaspora onstage. Sometimes, they question the choice to live in the land of cold sandwiches and underseasoned food (both egregious offenses in India). Sometimes, they give voice to the diaspora’s concerns.
Varun Grover, a revered Hindi comedian who is known for his biting political satire, performed this past September in Brooklyn. He was pleasantly surprised when he sold out his first tour of the U.S. He also didn’t expect that the Indian diaspora, which turned out in the thousands in support of the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi when he visited the U.S., would love his jokes about the Indian government or Mr. Modi’s penchant for posting videos.
Vaibhav Modi, who works in finance and is not related to the prime minister, commuted from New Jersey to attend Grover’s show. “India is tilting politically in a direction that is not healthy. I like that comedians like Varun point out the flaws,” he said.
Grover was glad to be proved wrong about his views about the diaspora. “It’s good to know that India outside India is as diverse as India within India,” he said.
These shows also blur geopolitical lines. Huma Motiwala grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and moved to the U.S. for graduate school. She loves Indian standup comedy and can see shades of her native country through jokes about the Indian bureaucracy’s idiosyncrasies.
“It’s like a small slice of home,” said Ms. Motiwala. “Through comedy you realize the issues that people have in India are the same as in Pakistan.”
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