How YouTube made Indian stand-up comic Kanan Gill an online super star
Comedian Kanan Gill is one of India’s hottest young talents, with a massive online following. So how did it happen, and why is he so suspicious of success?
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You’d think Indian comedian Kanan Gill wouldn’t have much to complain about, given the hectic climb up the comedy ladder he’s enjoyed over the past few years.
Unhappy as a software engineer, the 29-year-old began doing open mic nights in Bangalore as well as a comedy show on YouTube called Pretentious Movie Reviews, in which he and pal Biswa Kalyan Rath tore through some of Bollywood’s worst offerings.
The show was a monster hit, which lead to other online hits such as Dudes and How Insensitive!
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These, in turn, boosted the crowds at his live gigs.
Things were great.
Gill soon had his own Amazon special, Keep it Real (2017), and TV fame, hosting YouTube FanFest India and appearing on the Comedy Central improv show The Living Room.
Yet Kanan, now one of India’s best-known live acts and one of its biggest online stars, describes his new live show, Teetar, as “an anti-success show. I don’t know if that makes sense”.
It does sound odd, he acknowledges.
“Yeah, I feel like there’s a lot of pressure on everybody now, especially kids who are growing up now, to achieve everything and to be the best, otherwise they’re a failure,” he says.
“In a way, I’m just saying that it’s alright to just be OK.”
Gill says the component of luck in success “is so insane”.
“Most people have success, but very few people enjoy it,” he insists, adding emphatically: “Don’t let other people define what success is for you. That’s an individual thing for you.
“You don’t have to take a picture by the window of a private jet because you saw it on Instagram.”
All this is coming from somebody who, on top of his real-world achievements, has accrued 341,000 Instagram followers, 817,000 Twitter followers and nearly 700,000 subscribers to his official YouTube channel, which has had more than 56 million views.
“I understand the irony,” he says.
“But it comes from a selfish place, it comes from a realisation I had on my own where I found that I was getting more and more of the things that I wanted, but it didn’t feel like how I thought it would.
“I had a bunch of goals, I wanted to do this many YouTube videos, I wanted to get so many views and subscribers, I want to get a special and do it with Amazon.
“In my head I thought that when I passed all these markers it would be (cause for) a big celebration and everything would be fine after that. It was certainly not the case.
“I thought that you are happy when you achieve all your goals, but that’s not necessarily true.
“If you can’t figure out how to be happy in the process of achieving those goals, you’re just never going to be happy. You’re just going to be a miserable guy in the corner office.”
With a laugh, Gill agrees that if his routine offers any useful advice, it’s the old “smell the roses” cliche of enjoying the journey rather than being fixated on the destination.
He stops short of calling it a message, though.
“If I can find a way to hide that (idea) in comedy somewhere, maybe it can make a difference,” he says.
Besides, messaging isn’t his style.
“What I do is what I call ‘high-quality dumb jokes’,” Gill explains.
“So if I have something to say, I make sure I put it in the ‘dumb enough’ format, that people laugh at the joke first, then when they go home maybe they have something to think about.
“Comedy that is preachy does more to upset than to change.
“I don’t think much change is achieved by being as direct as possible.”
Although Indian humour is enjoying a major growth spurt at the moment, with Gill being just one of many young comedians at the vanguard, he’s not yet sure what the character of Indian humour is.
“You know what? I honestly think it’s too early to tell,” he says frankly.
“We’ve been doing stand up the way it’s been done in the West for, like, 10 years or less.
“So give us another five before we can say anything.
“Every new person is doing well because they are doing something radically different from other people.”
Western comedy “is an absolutely huge influence on Indian comedy”, he says.
“When I started out I did stand-up in English, so I watched all these comics from the UK, the US and even Australia,” Kanan says, citing Eddie Izzard, Jim Jefferies and late American stand-up Mitch Hedberg as among his favourites.
“So now the second and third generation of comics are coming up in India, and they look at our videos, and so they have a more local reference point.”
REVIEW: KANAN GILL: TEETAR
Rating: ★★★
Reviewer: Jim Schembri
For his much-anticipated Melbourne debut, Indian hotshot and online sensation Kanan Gill charmed a packed house of about 300 adoring fans — “the entire Indian population of Melbourne” — with a breezy, steadily paced, mathematically consistent set.
Affable, but not eager to go too far off-script, he gagged about Melbourne’s love of coffee (apparently mandatory for all visiting acts) before launching into “quality dumb jokes” about marching, medical anxieties and hernias.
From these ultra-lite, often overlong bits, Gill did dabble with more sophisticated musings about Julius Caesar, the birth of the metaphor, India’s over-population, Sanskrit and even suicide, a surprisingly edgy and polished piece that some might find crass.
Clearly unafraid to test boundaries, he hit a huge raw nerve with a reference to India’s issues over religious tolerance. It drew an instant, collective “ooooh” from the throng. A golden moment.
Gill could dial down the cultural esoterica a tad, but if his intention was to connect with the Melbourne chapter of his international fanbase he did so with ease on the first try.
Kanan Gill, Teetar, Arts Centre Melbourne - Pavilion, April 19-21.
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