Art
Veg or Non-Veg?: A Chat with Rahul Subramanian
How does a corporate marketing guy become a stand-up comedian and YouTube star? Sharanya S finds out.
According to most people, I make jokes on Facebook, people like it and then money just shows up at my house. A guy comes with the gas cylinder and looks at the number of likes on my post. 100 likes? Okay, here’s your cylinder.
Rahul Subramanian has had a frustrating day. I can tell because he's constantly glancing at his laptop while I’m talking to him and also because I follow him on Twitter. For the past couple of weeks, a specific joke that’s part of his set has kept popping up on random egg-headed, content-spewing Twitter handles and then today (February 21, when I met him), actor and comedian Gaurav Gera has used that joke in one of his videos as well. “Honestly, I don't feel enraged. I understand it, it’s just a joke. Someone tells you a joke and you tell your friend. But it’s my profession. It’s how I make money. So, I’m going to call them out on it,” he says. But his frustration isn’t just at Gera, but at a fan that complained about him whining about plagiarism and not posting enough jokes. He shows me that comment on his screen. "At what level should I argue with this girl? It’s my joke, it takes hard work. I can't use that joke anymore. And I post 3-4 jokes everyday. That’s more than most comedians!”
Rahul Subramanian channels his inner rapper
© Only Much Louder
Unfortunately, being a stand-up comedian (or anyone who makes money out of their personal brand) in the scene right now means you cannot avoid social media. Rahul tells me he’s joined them all out of pressure and he definitely feels it. “I go on a vacation and worry that I haven’t posted anything in two days. And honestly, I spend less time than other comedians online. So, I guess that’s the future. That’s where I’m heading.”
THE SWITCH
“I think of jokes as visuals,” Rahul Subramanian tells me the first time I meet him, which I believe instantly since the visuals are what got him to make that big jump from brand manager at Mahindra and Mahindra to stand-up comedian. In 2015, Rahul was on his way to watch a play featuring Paresh Rawal with his family, when his phone flashed a message with a smiley face. He’d got a new job offer at Godrej, a position he wanted, with the money he had demanded. He came back home happy and started picturing this great new life he was about to start.
Imagine if you will, one of those old-timey picture projectors. He visualized his new life, more money, work he cared about. Things were going very well… until they weren’t.
(a dark shadow fades across the screen)
Does he even care about this job? Does he care about this money? Will this really make him happy?
After a conversation with his brothers, a big decision was made, greatly upsetting the HR department at Godrej.
For the past two years, followers of the Indian comedy scene may have noticed Rahul Subramanian show up in a lot of videos mostly with comedy collective All India Bakchod and some with Biswa Kalyan Rath. I meet him after his show at Mumbai’s Tuning Fork where he is performing weekend shows with fellow comedians Abhishek Upamanyu and Prakhar Pramod. “I can’t do what Abhishek can do, I just can’t,” he tells me. “When (the erstwhile) The Comedy Store opened in Mumbai and I went to watch shows, there was always some part of me that thought, 'Well, I can do that.' But as a comedian now, there are some people I’ll watch and know instantly that I cannot do (what they do). Abhishek is one of them, so is Varun Grover”.
It’s a pretty good night at Tuning Fork. I’m in early and I see people streaming in. A big collective round of drinks is being ordered and there is loud and excited chatter. Rahul Subramanian closes the night and the crowd loves him. He’s confident, he moves all over the stage and talks about sex and drugs and tennis and DJs. He’s wearing a grey t-shirt and jeans, which is something he's thought about more than the casual attire suggests; having worn only formal clothes in his previous corporate life. “I won’t wear a blazer like Kenny (Sebastian), but I won’t wear shorts either. I don’t want people to think that I take my job seriously. I’m not saying they should think I don’t take my job seriously. I’m saying I don’t want there to be a thought about my clothes at all,” says Rahul. “So, t-shirt and jeans. Plus, I want to look good in the photos,” he adds.
Subramanian is not a very superstitious person. He has no pre-show rituals, no lucky socks or specific backstage song. But he does have a technique he uses to stay mindful on stage. “When you do a lot of shows, it becomes an easy habit; it’s repetitive and you are not living the show anymore. So I don’t over-prepare and when I get on stage, I’m completely blank for 10 seconds. I say whatever comes to my mind and sometimes I’ve actually just stood silently. It helps me get alert. I’m aware of the lights, the audience, I’m here, I’m on stage and I’m doing what I love. It’s those first 10 seconds,” he says. He mentions two specific shows to me when I ask about memorable ones, “The first time I did an open mic night, I bombed and I cried on my way home, and the first time my wife’s parents came to watch me perform, I completely freaked out.”
I ask him about his influences and he mentions Brian Regan, multiple times. We discuss comedy specials and he says he’s more of a “dark theatre and a spotlight on me” kind of comedian. “More Norm McDonald, more Bill Burr, more Eddie Izzard,” he specifies. “I have a very scattered mind and my comedy comes from that; I thrive on it. I don’t think I have ever looked at my comedy as a vehicle for social change. My comedy has no message. I just want people to have fun at the show and it doesn’t matter if they take anything back with them,” he says.
THE BIG BREAK
The story of anyone quitting a cushy job in a big company to follow their dreams is the kind of story that would demand an inspiring caption on a Humans of New York post. But Rahul admits, he really sucked at his job. “I was going to open mics and performing while I had the job and somehow I was lucky that my boss and colleagues supported me, but I really wasn’t doing a good job.”
It was at Mahindra and Mahindra that Rahul met Kumar Varun (the other funny guy from his office) and went on to form the comedy collective Random Chikibum (the other RCB). “We are similar people (engineering, MBA, married, Liverpool FC fans), but the biggest connect was the fact that we appreciated each other's sense of humour and found each other genuinely funny. We've both realised that we can't write sketches alone. Whenever we sit together, the proverbial ‘whole is greater than sum of its parts’ happens. So we decided to write and create videos of our own. And it was at this point that YouTube Comedy Hunt was announced and we thought, let's try this,” explains Varun, who you may recognize from Better Life Foundation, Behti Naak or the numerous other videos he’s been part of.
Subramanian and Varun play diverse characters
© Only Much Louder
In 2015, YouTube along with All India Bakchod, Kanan Gill and Biswa Kalyan Rath announced the Comedy Hunt, an online search for new and aspiring comedy creators. Every Monday, contestants would have to create a sketch based on a specific theme (news comedy, branded content, etc) and eliminations were held on a weekly basis. The finale of the YouTube Comedy hunt was held at NCPA in Mumbai and out of the four finalists, RCB won. “I was mostly just relieved that I don’t have to work on sketches late in the night, after a whole day of work and amused that we just won this. We were just having fun,” says Rahul.
Almost immediately after this, they were signed by artist management company Only Much Louder and began working on YouTube’s daily comedy show, Laughter Games. "I first started managing them after Comedy Hunt and we pretty much went right into Laughter Games,” says Prashant Reddy, their manager. “It meant they had to write and direct and act and put up with us and brands and basically be creative leads while they both had full-time jobs.” Reddy adds that Rahul quit his job since then and they’ve both grown tremendously as writers. “They understand what works with brands, shoots and budgets and what it takes to create good content. And they’ve grown to become pretty much everyone’s favourite actors now."
I ask Rahul about striking a balance between his personal stand-up and his work with RCB. He says he’d love to have those problems, he wants to worry about that balance, but those problems don't exist yet. Time is, admittedly, a big problem since Varun still has a full-time job. But they are committed to fixing that this year. “RCB requires a higher time commitment than acting for other creators. And that’s one of the reasons why we haven’t been able to make as many videos as we would have liked. But we did create four hilarious videos for Digibank by DBS which got rave reviews and I was delighted - both as the creator and the brand manager!” says Varun.
OFF STAGE
A day job, unlike stand-up comedy and its erratic hours, offers routine and I wonder what kind of toll it takes on your life to go from one to the other. Rahul says he no longer has the time to party, dance, drink or karaoke like he used to. “When I had a job I hated, I wanted to run away from it. But now I love what I do, but I feel the need to disengage,” he says. What does he do for fun? “I like to play football which really takes my mind off everything. I watch Netflix, but then you know I get distracted and check social media. Fuck… I need a hobby.”
How about traveling? Do stand-up comedians take enough vacations? “Look, I can be quite insensitive, I can’t appreciate anything beautiful beyond a point. I went to Darjeeling with some friends. It was great. The Kanchenjunga was so beautiful, on the first day. But my friends were excited about it every day! Kanchenjunga, so beautiful, everyday! It's the same Kanchenjunga! I’m looking at the fucking Kanchenjunga and nothing is happening to me.”
How does this new schedule affect his marriage? “It’s tough. She leaves for work before I wake up and she’s asleep by the time I get back home. We are both spontaneous people and make our own decisions but then realise that we haven’t spoken all day. But you know, we went to the Maldives recently and that trip was so important. We are not planners, she had to apply for leave, I had to figure my shows, there was a lot of back and forth. It was all last minute and somehow we just booked stuff and went and it was great.” I speak briefly with his wife, Sonica, at the show and ask her how she handled the career switch and the financial instability it must have caused. “I was happy he quit because he used to call me from work and vent everyday. And I wasn’t worried about money because I have a great job,” she says.
Before I leave, I ask him if there is something he worries about and he looks again at his laptop screen. “Once, I made a joke that someone said was similar to a line Eminem has in his song ‘Space Bound'. I hadn’t heard it and when I did, I thought it was similar and deleted it, even though I thought it was great. In an ideal world, there is a possibility that two people could think of the same joke. The probability does exist and it’s only reasonable to assume that. In this case (his plagiarized joke), it wasn’t a coincidence because it was copied verbatim and it’s been happening frequently over the last week. But now that I’ve taken this stand, this is what I fear. Some day, these people will turn on me, they will throw this in my face and you can’t have logical, reasonable arguments on social media. I look at Tanmay (Bhat) or Kanan (Gill) and I don’t know how they handle it so well. I’m worried my personal life will get dragged into things, I worry my chats will get screenshot, I worry about being too friendly, I worry about women hitting on me, I worry that I don’t know who is listening to this. Yeah, that’s what I worry about,” he says. 15 minutes later, he gets on stage at Summer House Café in Lower Parel and performs a fantastic set.