Hyderabad-based comedian puts smile on each face

Hyderabad-based Vivek Muralidharan is the only stand-up comedian who has been performing live every night for online audience

Vivek Muralidharan’s comedy videos could be raking in millions of views on YouTube now, but like many other Indians he pursued engineering before he could figure out what he actually wanted to do. He felt something was seriously lacking in life.

“During this phase, I met another stand-up comedian named Rajasekhar Mamidanna at a Toastmasters event in Hyderabad in July 2015. When I saw him do stand-up, I thought, ‘Hey this is nice and I can do it better’. Obviously the second part is still not true, but five years from there, I quit my job and decided to pursue this full-time,” Vivek tells Hyderabad Today.

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At first, his family members were afraid because they did not know what stand-up was. Then he got them to one of his shows. “After seeing the show, they became sure that I shouldn’t be doing this. But to perform stand-up, there needs to be a level of shamelessness, toward friends, family and society as a whole. I just had to show my parents that, and once they saw I wasn’t going to change, they changed,” shares Vivek, who used to be the one who constantly tries to crack jokes even before he started doing it professionally.

In the wake of the lockdown, stand-up comedy had to shut down, and comedians had to move online to Zoom, Google Meet, etc., to perform. “We started doing Insta Lives and Zoom shows before ticketing platforms started equipping themselves to help the online model. It took another month for me to get accustomed to performing on Zoom after which I asked myself one day as to what is stopping me from performing everyday,” shares Vivek whose ‘Surviving Maths’ video has over 2.3 million views on YouTube.

“I have been performing an hour of online stand-up comedy every night since August 14 in my show ‘Vivek Muralidharan Live’. I am the only stand-up comedian in India to be doing this,” claims Vivek.

The rationale behind it? The main purpose of stand-up comedy is to put smiles on people’s faces, and if people do need it at any point in time, it is now. “And by putting in the effort every night for an hourly show, the art has become financially viable for myself again,” shares Vivek, who comes up with his material mostly from conversations he has with his friends.

He is staying away from clubs and live shows until there is a vaccine. “Through the last eight months, I have personally seen people lose loved ones to Covid-19. As a comic, I definitely miss the stage a lot, but I don’t mind doing stand-up online until it is absolutely safe for my audience,” he says.

So, does he ever blank out while performing? “Yes, it happens sometimes. But the nice thing about comedy is that you can address it on stage, that you are blanking out. Comedy is as generous as you are shameless that way. And that is the difference between us and politicians,” he replies.

Favourite four

Stand-up comedian – Dave Chapelle
TV Show – Breaking Bad
Book – Midnight’s Children
Movie – All films by Martin Scorcese, Kim Ki Duk and Werner Hezrog

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