Stand-up comics, solo travellers take centre stage

Funny side up. Hooked to humour, this year’s ‘Social Media Week’ seems addicted to those whacky, adorably irreverent stand-up comedians. As if one artiste wasn’t enough to launch the week on Monday, SMW on Wednesday had an entire bunch of three, who wouldn’t stop talking! Of course, they talked sense when they collectively conversed about ‘Humour in blogs and Twitter.’

Utsav Chakraborty was one of them, taking brutality in honesty to unprecedented levels. Here’s one sample of his fertile reasoning: “Pornography is the reason that the internet exists. Internet existed 20 years before pornography, but no one cared!” So, if something had to be funny online, it had to be “orgasmically” funny, quipped the stand-up artiste, sitting down comfortably at Take 5 restaurant in Indiranagar.

But was the ‘AIB Roast’ that kicked up enough social media dust to corrupt every screen, funny enough? The moral brigade hardly thought so. The trio, of course, backed the Roasters fully, defending their right to free expression. Weren’t the people who watched the show on YouTube warned, weren’t they aware that it was a Roast and had its dose of bad language? “Still they watched it, and wanted it banned!”

The trio would have ventured deeper into controversial Roast territory. But Rakhi Sawant and Sunny Leone intervened just in time! The minute an audience member mentioned Rakhi’s name, the trio’s collective visages lit up. One of them grabbed the mike and paid an instant tribute: “She is still my favourite, after Sunny Leone. She is to me, the Chetan Bhagat of Reality TV,” blogger Aditya’s verdict was final.

So, are these stand-up comedians really original? If so, wasn’t originality the most threatened commodity online? Aditya’s response was classic tongue-in-cheek: He googled invisibly to come with a Benjamin Franklin line that famously read: “Originality is the art of concealing your sources!” But Praveen Kumar, relatively the most sober of the lot, was clear that to create a joke, one had to work hard. “But online, we won’t even know who’s copying us from where.”