Varun Grover

Speaking in Hindi has helped me a lot as I can tell my stories with the exact idiom in which they come to me. I think it also helps the audience when I am speaking in a language that is non-elite, so to say, as my stories are also from that perspective.

If you start imagining an audience for yourself, you don’t do justice to the job. You fall into that trap of a self-image."

My set on why I won’t have kids, and especially the mention of how expensive it is to have kids nowadays, always gets a great response."

My only success is that I am alive.

I was writing stand up comedy for TV for around 5 years and just wanted to attempt it myself. Vir Das started an amateur comedians’ night in Bombay in 2009 and I went for the very first one. It was a competition and I won the first prize.

I am primarily a comedian. Sometimes I also do comedy about my cats. Now unless you find metaphors in cats, there is nothing political about those and I love doing such jokes as much as I love doing political content.

There’s a lot of ordinariness, and people tend to play to the same regressive tropes - sexism, patriarchy, unkindness to the oppressed. Comedy shouldn’t fall into these traps - by its very nature comedy is supposed to be edgy and anti-establishment."

I don’t think stand-up comedy is becoming too serious, in fact, I wish it was. We are still mostly doing frivolous stuff."

Comedy as dissent or any art form as dissent is going to be our last safety valve.

I think both comedy and dissent are liberating, for the listener as well!

I don't think changing minds is possible with just comedy. It's too much to expect from your own art.

In general, even when I'm not doing political comedy, I want to be clever and find the least confrontational way to say the most offensive things.