Sumaira Shaikh on the road to Dongri Danger, her first stand-up special: It’s difficult for female comedians to get the numbers-Entertainment News , Firstpost

Sumaira Shaikh knows a thing or two about writing a punchline. The comedian co-wrote two seasons of Pushpavalli, easily one of the most original and subversive Indian web shows in recent memory.

She had a small cameo in the show as well. Shaikh turns in an effortlessly scene-stealing turn as one-half of the comically evil mean girls at a Bengaluru paying guest accommodation. Before that, she worked for the now-defunct All India Bakchod, and was a co-writer on Son of Abish, comedian Abish Mathew’s variety talk show. 

Shaikh, who studied psychology in college, started dabbling in writing only to support her stand-up comedy career, which did not “pay soon enough.” Even when she found herself getting interested in the intricacies of fiction writing, Shaikh, by her own admission, saw herself as a comedian first. A comedy special was always the dream, and now it is a reality — Dongri Danger, Shaikh’s debut comedy special, is streaming on Amazon Prime Video India.

That makes Shaikh the third Indian female comedian to have an hour of material on a streaming platform after Aditi Mittal, who has a Netflix special, and Anu Menon, who has an Amazon special to her credit. It is an achievement in itself, given the male-dominated, insular landscape of the Indian stand-up comedy scene. But it is also worth noticing the age gap between the much younger Shaikh and her two peers: Mittal and Menon are considered seasoned comics as opposed to Shaikh, who started doing stand-up comedy full-time only in 2016. 

As one of the few Muslim female comedians in the scene currently, Shaikh’s lived-in experiences also eschew the conventional talking points of the Indian comedy scene. In fact, the trailer of Dongri Danger captures the comedian in all her kooky spirit, someone who can easily shift between joking about gangsters and road trips. It is a bit of a poetic coincidence that Shaikh’s special is directed by comedian Sumukhi Suresh, who created, co-wrote, and starred in Pushpavalli, and whom the comedian counts as her closest collaborator.

Over a Zoom interview, Shaikh broke down her comedy writing process, the lessons she took from writing two seasons of Pushpavalli with Suresh, and her one wish for her comedy special. Edited excerpts below:

Tell me a little about the making of Dongri Danger?

I think more than anything, the special chronicles my evolution. I started doing stand-up comedy right after I graduated from college in 2015, and at that point, I thought of it as something I wanted to do for a year. But as the months went by, I found myself more invested in it. In 2016, my comedy was more observational in nature. I would write down the things I would observe around me, and go up on stage and do bits around them.

But I started viewing comedy very differently in 2017. My brother passed away, and it was a huge life change for me. It invariably changed me as a comedian. I felt like my comedic style had to evolve as well to match the person I had become. I couldn’t just do observational comedy anymore, although that’s still there of course. Dongri Danger really came together after that, because I started writing things more personally, like the perspective of my father being from Dongri, my own perspective of growing up there, and how different it is now. 

I know you physically toured this special in front of live audiences across India last year in the middle of the pandemic. But did the last two years of comedy shrinking down to Zoom screens have any effect on you as a comedian?

You know, even though the live tour happened last year, I did build a lot of it from Zoom. In 2020, I spent the whole year doing stand-up comedy on Zoom. Of course, it was different because audiences are behind a screen but the one thing I realised that even on Zoom, when you bomb and no one laughs, it feels as heartbreaking as it does on stage. In fact, it felt worse because you end the meeting on Zoom, and you’re back to feeling bad in your own bedroom alone. 

A counter to that question: What are the lessons that you took from touring your special across Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Kolkata?

As a comedian, I think real learning comes from going on tour. Basically, you come to know how strong your material is when you perform anywhere outside Mumbai. I think Mumbai, as a city, is very giving when it comes to performance art. Audiences are excited about it because they’ve seen different kinds of art, and are more open to it. That way, I think when you want to shoot anything, you want to do it in Mumbai because if nothing, the audience here will at least laugh. 

Other cities teach you things, like the fact that you can’t take so much time on one joke. Delhi, for instance, is a really emotional city. It teaches you to assess yourself as a comedian because they either love you or hate you. Most comics who are performing either in Delhi or Bombay know for a fact that it will go well because both these cities have an active comedy scene. But I was really surprised by Bangalore and Hyderabad, because the audiences in both these cities were very accepting and open, which I didn’t expect. 

Audiences tend to usually judge whether they want to listen to a comic based on their first comedy special. In your head, was there a specific way you wanted Dongri Danger to be remembered?

The first special of any comedian is a sacred moment because it’s the most unadulterated articulation of their voice. When I watch comedy specials of seasoned comics who have done multiple specials, I like to see their first special just to get a sense of where they started, and how it all began for them. In that sense, I always wanted my first special to be as funny as possible. That was the only voice in my head. I wanted people to take that away from me. Whatever shape my career takes in the coming years, I always wanted the starting point to be “Oh, she’s funny.” I also feel like I’ve managed to capture the essence of my voice in Dongri Danger. It’s sort of very on-the-face and honest, which is how I am as a person and a comedian.

I want to know a little about how exactly you went about fine-tuning the special while you were putting it together. Did it come together naturally or was it a process of trial and error? 

When I started writing the special, it really didn’t have any structure. It was all over the place, and had no theme, which was really opposite to the goal I had for it. I wanted people watching it to feel like there is a coherent theme to the whole thing. To do that, I shaved off a lot from my original material, and tried to make it as tight as possible. I also included storytelling in my special, which is something I don’t usually do as a comedian. I only do jokes. 

As a stand-up comedian, you are very programmed to get your feedback immediately because performing to a live audience is feedback.

Besides that, I  think you have to be very careful about who you ask for feedback. According to me — and this is my personal experience — every comic you go to for feedback will have something different to say because they all have their own individual style of comedy going on for them, which may not necessarily align with your sensibilities. For me, the person who works the most is Sumukhi because I write fiction with her. So she understands me as a writer — she knows that I have the tendency of not sticking to the point, and going all around it. Sometimes, she helps me with just figuring that out. At this point, I trust her enough to know that she’s coming from a space of just making the special better. What makes her a great sounding board is that she’s a comedian herself, and can also preempt responses to certain bits.

Did the process of writing two seasons of Pushpavalli, a show that flits between being a comedy and a thriller, alter the way you approach stand-up comedy in any way?

What writing fiction does is that it really puts you in the habit of writing because comics don’t write. As comics, we are our own bosses: when nobody is in charge of you, you tend to get lazy. And when you don’t regularly write new material, you’re stuck in a rut. I’ve personally seen comics turn bitter when whatever they have isn’t working out because they’ve not written anything new. But if you’re doing fiction, you’re writing everyday. You get up in the morning, you have a whole schedule and deadlines to adhere to, which really puts you in the zone. The discipline of fiction helped me as a comic because I don’t take stage time for granted anymore. In my head, if I’m getting stage time, then I have to justify it by writing new material. 

The other thing fiction storytelling has taught me is patience because writing fiction inherently involves a lot of feedback coming in from different quarters. So you get used to sitting and fixing every little thing. With stand-up comedy earlier, I used to be a little impatient — I would wonder everyday why something wasn’t working out or why people weren’t laughing. But now, I’ve taken that learning to stand-up, where if something doesn’t work out, I know that I can go back and rewrite it. I tell myself I’ve done this before with fiction, and it’s in fact much easier to do with stand-up because it’s my own thing. 

As someone whose artform exists at the intersection of number of tickets sold and views on the internet, what metric do you personally use to gauge your success?

It changes every six months. When I initially started putting out my videos on YouTube — those were directed and edited by Kenny Sebastian — the metric for success was 1 million views. It was assumed that there was no point in putting out a video if you don’t cross that mark. At that time, I was very fortunate to have been surrounded by comics who had already seen the ups and downs of the medium. 

Sumukhi had then told me that the point of putting your stuff on YouTube isn’t really not about getting 1 million views. It’s about finding your audience, and being consistent with your videos. Even if you have 100k views on a video, those 100k are people who like your voice, who like your joke, and who will buy a ticket to come see you perform on stage. Getting this advice really early on in my career saved me because when you get into the numbers game, you’re gone. If you look at my social media, I have 40k followers on Instagram, and close to 100k subscribers on YouTube — in terms of numbers, I’ve grown very slowly but it helps that these numbers translate well when I have to sell tickets. That’s only because I’ve been consistent with my work.

That seems less for a female comedian who has a stand-up comedy special on Amazon Prime Video…

I mean, it’s difficult for female comedians to get the numbers. I’m sorry to say this but I think Indian audiences inherently relate more to the topics that the male comedians talk about. Sumukhi once told me this math: Double the numbers that any female comedian has gotten for their videos, and that’s the number a male comedian would get. It’s really true.

Dongri Danger is streaming on Amazon Prime Video India.

Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on Twitter.

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