Shraddha Jain: Laughter Express

Engineer, RJ, and reality show director Shraddha Jain is now a comedy sensation in multiple languages

Close to a lakh follow Shraddha Jain (@aiyyoshraddha) for her funny videos on Instagram, but when she began posting, she had no idea she would be a comic sensation.
It all started with short videos to keep her father’s spirits up. When she posted an Instagram video describing how her father reacts to the pasta she makes, he was among those who laughed hard.
That brought her comfort, considering how dejected he had been since her mother’s passing. Shraddha then followed it up with another video, and then another. Her father’s delight multiplied every time an acquaintance forwarded a video to him on WhatsApp. He was like a father beaming at his daughter’s photo in the newspaper. And he was hooked to her humour.

Hug at a salon
“For me he was the audience. He lives in Mangaluru and I live in Bengaluru. We could connect like this,” Shraddha told Showtime. In the months that followed, as she posted more videos, her following grew. A woman at a salon walked up to Shraddha, gave her a hug, and told her how her videos had lifted her out of depression. “That was a great feeling I wasn’t used to,” says Shraddha, musing about the healing power of humour. People of her parents’ generation were relating to it, and young people told her she was part of their family WhatsApp groups.
Shraddha works for the Kannada entertainment channel Colors TV, directing its non-fiction shows. Her music reality show Haadu Karnataka is a hit. But a comedy show she attempted, Comedy Company, didn’t work, much to her surprise. That was also a moment of self-reflection: directing reality shows, involving 200 people, was a huge, complex exercise. Shooting her own two-minute videos, on the other hand, was a breeze.
The ability to talk spontaneously, wittily, and without a break is a skill she picked up from radio. As an RJ on Fever FM, she learnt ‘content structure’. “My content is one take, start to finish. The one-take thing came from radio,” she says.

‘It happened to me’
Shraddha is not too keen on topical, newsy videos that ride on what is current. Which is why you won’t find her offering a take on political developments, or even lifestyle and dating trends. She draws on her own experience to create comedy, and believes she isn’t ready yet for political satire. Shraddha the comic, she says, is not too different from Shraddha the person.
The video on the corona scare, one of her biggest hits in recent weeks, took her just 40 minutes to shoot and upload. The idea came when she was in the lift, and then she went to her room, shot it on her phone, and posted it online.
“All my content is in that space that you relate to. A lot of it is observational comedy. I have not attempted anything controversial,” she says. Her videos are thus about relatives, shopping for Deepavali, and ethnic day at office, with some exaggeration for comic effect. “My content is U/A. I am not good at adult humour,” she says.

Middle-class concerns
Shraddha realised she was funny when she was in school. Her father was an accountant, and her mother a government school teacher, and she describes her background as “extremely middle class”. That’s the reason she never imagined comedy could be a career choice. Like her peers, she studied engineering.
“How do you put funny into a career?” she wonders. “Growing up, I couldn’t even think of saying something like I want to be like Johnny Lever.”
But things are changing, and she believes comedy is becoming ‘mainstream’ with the advent of stand-up. “I’m thinking maybeeee. Even my father, he is now thinking, ‘Haaan... why not?’” she says, with her now famous elongated vowels.
In her view, now is the time for comedy. “Social media is biting you in the face and saying what are you waiting for,” she says.

Pushpavalli role
She credits her acting debut in web series Pushpavalli (Amazon Prime) to ‘a stroke of luck.’ Sumukhi Suresh, who wrote the series, used to listen to Shraddha’s radio show, and thought she might be able to pull off the role of a feisty PG hostel owner in Bengaluru.
Then in Puducherry, Shraddha did a quick audition on her phone and sent it to Sumukhi. She had improvised a bit, describing her hip pocket as ‘Bum Sandra’. Sumukhi and director Debbie Rao loved that quirky touch, and took her on board. She flew to Mumbai to shoot for the comedy drama. Two seasons are done, and the third and last is coming up.
Inspiring shows
Shraddha cites ‘The Week That Wasn’t’ and ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway’ as shows that inspire her. “I have been a huge fan of Cyrus Broacha. He doesn’t use low-hanging fruit in humour,” she says. Comedy calls for deep knowledge of politics, literature and cricket, and she envies people in the humour business who have it.
What’s coming up? She would like someone to bet on her and maybe make a film. And this year, she wants to do a ‘proper stand-up act,’ and that calls for a longer script than she is used to writing. A successful comic is well-read and improvises by drawing on a variety of performance arts, and that is where she would like to get. “And I would like corona to end quickly so we can have open mics,” she says.