A night out at the Canvas Laugh Club - Indian stand-up comedy

On Thursday evening, we had a work night out to see a stand-up comedy show at the Canvas Laugh Club in Lower Parel, a short drive south of Bandra.

My view of the stage - we kept a sensible distance from the action

I have seen stand-up a few times in the UK and the format was very similar; with a compare followed  by two main acts.  The rules of behaviour were the same - do not sit in the front row or do anything at all to draw attention to yourself unless you want to get hassled.  There was a student in the front row taking a four year degree in footwear design, which provided enough material to keep the intro act going for a while!

Saying that, stand-up comedy is a great platform to observe key differences in culture in terms of what engages people and forms the centre of the routines.

Two main areas of material were Bollywood and politics.  It appears that I have acclimatised in India well as and had a pretty good idea who and what was being discussed, and what the jokes actually meant.  There was also plenty of the universal stand-up comedy topics, mostly rude and puerile, but entertaining never-the-less.

In terms of understanding though, there was a bit of a barrier in that two out of the three comics spoke changing freely between English and Hindi so, for me, understanding each joke involved piecing all the bits of English together to work out what it was all about.  This also though taught me that so much of our communication is actually driven by expression, tone and action, as I could tell what was going on despite not having a full grasp of what was actually being said.

The most surprisingly aspect for me, though, was the level of controversy included in the routines, which were far more irreverent than I could have imagined, particularly regarding topics that would be taboo for the vast majority of the Indian population (and certainly in a public area).   This is reminded though that Bombay is most liberal and western city in India, and becoming more so among certain groups and classes.  My colleagues said that the routine is ok in Mumbai and Bangalore, but would not be acceptable in more conservative cities like Delhi.

Anyway, it was a decent night out and I would happily go back again (possibly with a Hindi dictionary next time).