Superstar Indian multi-hyphenate Vir Das says about comedy: ‘It’s kind of like changing the map in your mind.’
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Nuanced content aside, concerns about backlash from all corners has been front-and-centre for artists of all stripes for a few years now. A nearly 20-year comedy veteran, Das has felt the sting of not only social-media trolls, but also how his artistic expression drew real-world ire after he was called a terrorist and had seven charges laid against him (since dropped) in India after a 2021 performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., where he finished a show by reading a poem he wrote called: I Come from Two Indias.
Video of him reading the poem describes the contradictions in his home country: “I come from an India with the largest working population under 30 but still listens to 75-year-old leaders with 150-year-old ideas,” and “I come from an India where we worship women during the day and gang-rape them at night.”
It went viral. And Indian state officials got very angry.
Das said he didn’t foresee the backlash that came his way.
“What I do know is your content can become controversial, but controversy should never become your content, right?” said Das, who won an International Emmy Award for his 2023 Netflix standup special, Landing.
“You can’t predict what will go viral … If you try to second-guess that as an artist and to drive yourself insane, your best bet is to just have at it and go at it. And then deal with it when they’re upset. I don’t think there’s any predicting what makes people upset.”
Das says the years since that video went viral have been strange but also good. He’s a true multi-hyphenate who has two TV shows in development with U.S. studios and is putting the final post-touches on the feature film Happy Patel, shot in India, which he co-directed, wrote and starred in. He’s also finishing up working on his fifth Netflix special, which doesn’t have a premiere date yet.
“I am surprised by everything and not surprised by it,” said Das about the world today. “I guess that’s probably the state that most people are in, where you’re just overwhelmed … But also, all of it can turn into standup, that is the bright side to it, at least for my profession.”
If ever there was a global artist, it’s Das.
He was born in India, raised in Nigeria and went to college in Illinois. That, combined with an extensive world tour that has seen him visit every continent except Antarctica in the last 20 months, gives him a perspective not many of us have.
“I definitely have had a strangely, uniquely global upbringing, which I would mention not a lot of all these audience members have had. But it’s taken awhile to get to the point where I just kind of recognize, ‘OK, this is who I am, and my best bet is to do me,’ ” said Das.
As for those audiences, Das says they’re usually made up of around 60 per cent Indians.
“I think a lot, a lot of people are coming in for two reasons. Maybe the Indians are coming in because they want to get caught up with home, because they miss home. And I’m kind of bringing home to them,” said Das, adding he also feels a responsibility to represent a modern India to his crowds. “A large part of the audience, their parents are from where I’m from, but it’s not the place that I’m actually from.
“What I find is a lot of Indians they kind of grew up with this time capsule version of India that parents left behind. So, if your mom and dad came over to Canada in 1975, that’s what you grew up believing India was. You know, and you’re 21 years old, and it’s my job to come in and be like, ‘No, I’m from Mumbai. This is what we do and everything your parents told you was a lie. This is modern India, and we’re hopefully a little more fun and a little more audacious than you thought.’ ”
As for the non-Indian audience members, Das says a lot of local people are coming to the show “because they want something new and to see what they look like to an outsider.”
Das explained as an outsider he comes in with fresh perspectives, and the freedom to apply those to all sorts of topics.
“In North America, or at least in the West, most comedy right now is either ideology or identity- based,” said Das. “And sometimes to have an outsider come in and say, ‘This is my only agenda, I’m only passing through, and I don’t belong to either one of these camps that you guys are so divided into.’ And you know, it’s kind of how I see it broadly on all ends. Sometimes that’s a little more freeing, and you’re able to talk about things that … a local comic may not be able to.”
At the end of the day, Das just wants people to see the humour in things. And hopefully, in doing so, they’ll be able to avoid less reactive stress and take a beat when life comes in hot.
“What I like about my profession is that we can fundamentally disagree about s–t, but agree that it’s funny as hell, it’s absurd as hell,” said Das. “It’s kind of like changing the map in your mind. Yeah, some s–it is horrible, but if I can attach something silly to it, then the next time you’re faced with it, you think of the silly thing.”