‘Playing safe is never good for comedy’

Stand-up comic Rajiv Satyal on not knowing Hindi and how we need champions of free speech

Rajiv Satyal in Delhi

Here I am, a 41-year old adult, and these are my parents sitting in the first row. If you thought that you as an Indian child would ever be free of them — well, you don’t. I travel with them or my wife,” said stand-up comic Rajiv Satyal to a tittering crowd of young adults at Delhi’s American Center in a packed show last week.

Satyal, an Indian-American stand-up comic, who grew up in Hamilton Ohio, is currently on a multi-city tour of India and was part of the ‘Cultural Connections Through Humour’ initiative and was in conversation with writer and fellow comic Maheep Singh. “I was about eight-nine years old and would try and make my friends laugh in school. There was this one friend Ryan, who would never laugh. And then one day I said something really lame and he cracked a smile and conceded that I was funny. And that was that. I then started doing acts on Diwali and other festival gatherings,” says Satyal, who opened for PM Narendra Modi in San Jose at SAP Centre in 2015 during Modi’s state visit to the USA. “Comedy is all about dissent and raising questions. The opening act for PM Modi was kind of restrictive. I had written something very benign on the lines of the International House of Pancakes, and Modi’s team came back and said that they didn’t want Modi to be associated with pancakes,” says Satyal. “I think in America we still have champions of free speech. And yes people might take offence, but imagine if you are doing a joke and no one is offended by it. You are not doing it right. Playing safe is never good for any form of comedy,” he adds.

Satyal, who has a degree in materials engineering from the University of Cincinnati and Ohio, started doing comedy as a serious venture in 2002. “I don’t speak Hindi. I know it’s a travesty, especially when my parents hail from Allahabad. They spoke English at home, and they always fought in Hindi. And it is so interesting and unique that contemporary Indian comedy is done in something like Hinglish. They (the stand-up comics) will set the premise of the joke in English and the punchline would be in Hindi. It’s like I know the beginning of these stories and I don’t know the end. Three guys walk into a bar. Toh phir? I can’t make head or tail of it,” says Satyal.

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Satyal’s comedy is a mix of self deprecating humour and self aggrandisement. Over the years he has opened for Russell Peters, Dave Chappelle , apart from an instance of doing stand-up for tennis legend Pete Sampras in a locker room. “I don’t think leaders and comedians go together. The idea of a king and a court jester, sure. But you cannot be both. I think being a comic is a subset of my leadership qualities. Be it a large or a small group, I think I could control the emotions of the group — make them laugh, make them emote, rile them up perhaps,” he adds.

Satyal also made news with a YouTube video titled I am Indian in 2014. The video had him extolling the virtues of India, where he said that we can boast about Bollywood, iconic music conductor Zubin Mehta and spelling bee champions among others. The video went viral and was shared by many from Bollywood. It also came under much criticism for being jingoistic. “Maybe now that video will be seen as jingoistic. There was some criticism from Indians in India about the contents. I believe all content should be timeless and timely. The video was timeless, and timely in 2014. But at that time we didn’t know what was in store. The government had just changed and we didn’t know which way the tide will turn,” says Satyal.

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