Cresting The Wave Of India's Comedy Big Bang

A quick lesson: 'bakchod' is Hindi slang which translates roughly as 'senseless fucker', but in common parlance is used more akin to 'talking shit'. Which gives you a pretty good idea where barnstorming Indian comedy collective All India Bakchod are coming from.

The talented four-piece have in the last few years parlayed their success in the nascent Indian stand-up scene into massive online traction and adulation, their massively popular YouTube channel having over 1.4 million subscribers. And technology has also helped the friends forge a collective voice slightly more risque than your average Indian comic.

"Five or six years ago the live stand-up scene in English in India didn't exist — there was no such thing, maybe one or two performers who would occasionally do an auditorium show."

"The thing is most mainstream comedy in India because of the way our… I don't want to say censorship laws, but the way our broadcasting regulations work and our media regulations work, most of the stuff in the mainstream publications is very safe," explains Ashish Shakya. "But we made a personal choice not to be safe, and as a result of that because we're online we could say whatever we wanted without scrutiny or censorship. I think we just spoke a more natural, and a result of that edgier, language."

"It's this massive pop cultural leap forward that we've had because of the internet, with everyone having access to everything," marvels Gursimran Khamba. "It's not just in comedy, you see it around all sorts of different pop cultural spaces."

Strangely this field they're now dominating — English-language comedy — basically didn't exist in India just a few years ago.

"Five or six years ago the live stand-up scene in English in India didn't exist — there was no such thing, maybe one or two performers who would occasionally do an auditorium show, but there was no scene," Ashish recalls. "There was no next tier of comedians, no open mic shows and nobody trying to do comedy, and then in 2010 we had our first open mic night ever here in Mumbai, and now there's a dedicated comedy venue in Mumbai that has a show every single night; Bangalore is getting its first dedicated comedy club next month, Delhi's getting one soon. Now there's hundreds of comedians, so the live scene has exploded tremendously in the last five years — it didn't exist and now it's there, like a big bang almost."

And AIB's comedy can now even be seen on mainstream TV in India, although in a wildly sanitised form.

"We still believe that we're first and foremost a digital and live company, so we make sure that we're always writing firstly for our online audience — we're always writing to what they like," Gursimran explains. "So for example with our TV show the TV company cut down the show that aired originally online first, so when you watch the version online it's quite free and edgy — for want of a better word — but the TV version is a safer version, it's been sanitised and cut down. So a 29-minute web episode would become a one-minute TV segment. If anything it's made us enforce barriers that I think we should have had anyway — all part of growing up and learning comedy."