Do The Difficult

From offline to online

10 April 2020. India was in lockdown and it was clear that Covid is here to stay for a long time. I was sipping tea in the morning, sitting on my bed and I was overwhelmed with this one thought – IT IS OVER! YOUR CAREER AS A COMEDIAN IS OVER!

I am generally not the one to be flustered by challenges. In fact, I thrive in them. I thought I had already taken the biggest risk in my professional life back in 2016 when I quit Microsoft to become a comedian. But this was different. Covid destroyed the very core of what this art form of comedy is based on – LIVE performance! If I don’t get to perform, there is no career! It was a genuine end of the road feeling. 

Standup comedy is a live medium. You need a proper setting - lights, sound, live audiences and live feedback from them, for it to work. Any one element missing and the show flops. Could we take standup comedy online? The answer seemed like a big resounding NO!

C’mon, perform standup comedy to a laptop? Impossible!

How do u get live feedback? If you keep the audio on for audience, there will be noise you can’t control. If you keep them on mute, it’s like performing to an empty room

I have learnt in life that if there is a choice between doing something difficult or taking the easy road. Always #DoTheDifficult. It somehow always works out better. So a few days later, I decided to announce an online zoom standup comedy show. I performed my first online show on April 15, 2020. 

This post is about everything that I have learnt since then.

• Learn & adapt:  18 people turned up for my first show on Zoom. I stood 3 ft away from the laptop and tried my best to perform the way I would on stage. I bombed horribly! Even after unmuting the audience, I couldn’t hear the laughter properly. After every punchline I would pause, expecting laughter but I would hear silence. There was a lag! Laughter came but after a few milliseconds and by that time I would have moved on to the next line, cutting that laughter. That completely threw me off! I lost my rhythm! When I looked sideways to deliver a dialogue in an act-out, they thought someone had entered my room and got distracted. Every small disturbance from the audience side - a doorbell ringing or a dog barking, threw me off completely. It was a shit show!!  My first thought after the show was ‘It can’t be done”. Thankfully, my second thought was – “u must learn and adapt”. That night after the show, I made a list of small changes that need to be made to do online shows (see pic). Just the simple act of writing this down made me feel better. If there is scope…there is hope!

• Be professional: It was so easy to give in to this notion that just because this is online, it’s temporary & hence not really worth the effort. I have seen some comedians sit in the front of the laptop in their casual Sunday attire and perform as if they were in a family call. I was clear from the start - If I do this, I will do this professionally! So, I invested in lights, a proper mic system, a stool on which I would sit and perform, made sure the backdrop was consistent and not distracting, bought AirPods so I could hear audiences (ok that was just an excuse to buy them) but most importantly, I took a shower, dressed up, wore proper shoes and put on my fav cologne before every online show! Weeks later, corporate online shows started, and they wanted the shows to be delivered as professionally as possible and I was ready! If you are putting your brand out there, you damn well give them a show worth every penny! You have to put a value to your craft so that others find value in that experience.   

• Invest in your craft: I am a comedian and a writer. Although there were no immediate rewards for learning new skills during the lockdown, I still started investing in learning the craft of comedy and writing. I signed up for Masterclass to learn scriptwriting, storytelling, comedy, theatre etc. I read every book on comedy that I could get my hands on and even invested in self-improvement books (my top recco - Atomic Habits). Why was this important? Because, even though it was by a small margin, it still moved the needle for me every day. If the world around you has changed, change yourself for the better! 

• Believe in the process: As an artist I always felt, the show was the reward. The laughter, the applause, the spotlight, the selfies, loving fans – the whole celeb deal – that’s what made me tick! In 2020, all that was taken away! Even when I stepped out of the house, I had a mask on. No one recognized me, no one asked for selfies, there was no stage! Initially all this played a lot on my mind. I used to think that all that attention was central for me to operate as an artist. And when it was taken away, I found it impossible to write new jokes or create anything new. I was literally decaying as a writer. I read in a book (Atomic Habits) – It is better to do something, even if its small, than to do nothing at all. So, I forced myself, every day, to write something…anything. I failed a lot. Some days, I would just sit and stare at a blank screen. But the days I would be able to write a few lines – I felt so good! And that’s when I realized that despite all the jazz of stage going away, I still feel happy when I do the basics of my job well – which is writing. When in doubt, fall back to the basics, lean on the process and you would realize that the process is more important than the reward.

• Think Think Think: When you are going through a difficult phase, sometimes it’s easy to fall into this ‘let’s go with the flow’ trap. After my first few online standup comedy shows, I could have just said – ‘hey at least something is happening, let’s go with the flow’. Instead, I spent a lot of time thinking about the situation & the shows. Something was missing. Not the live experience etc, that was a given. But something else. I was missing a beat and I couldn’t put a finger to it. Till one day, while driving, I heard this statement on a podcast - ‘online is a more intimate medium’. And the lightbulb went ON! This is it! This is what is missing! You can’t pretend that Zoom is a stage! You can see the audience’s houses & they can see yours, most of them are sitting in their bedrooms while watching the show, this is more intimate than a comedy club! And that gave birth to my crowd work show - Mor The Merrier! Wherein I would just sit and talk to the audience (instead of one-way jokes) & would create jokes out of those conversation. It changed the game for me. From the very first show I knew I had a winner on my hand! Of all the stuff that I have done during lockdown, I am proudest about Mor The Merrier. It has built a super loyal community of fans, who now come for every show! We have done crazy stuff on the show (once we got a couple married live on the show). Today every show runs for 7-10 HOURS non-stop! Yes, you heard it right - 10 Hours and even then, the audience insists we carry on more! Online world gives the ability to try out new stuff much more than the offline world. Don’t be afraid to do it. You might be sitting on a winner!

Now, 9 months later, as I write this, I have performed over 100 online shows since the lockdown, I wrote and tested a new standup special online, came out with a new podcast called Stupid No Mor, created a new format crowd work show called Mor The Merrier, started writing a web-series and got to perform online standup for some of the top companies like - Google, HP, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Sesame, Intel, Telstra, Cisco, GSK, Walmart, Star Sports, Airtel & many more.    

2021 now looks even more exciting because there are endless possibilities to the kind of content that can be created both online and offline. The scope has become bigger and I am bursting with ideas and enthusiasm for what’s to come next.

I don’t know what frame of mind or stage of career you are in right now as you read this. All I can tell you with certainty is this – The world didn’t end in 2020. It just changed. You are still alive! Now, it is up to you to adapt yourself to this new world, invest in your craft and make the most out of it.

Thank you for the love and wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Cheers

Anshu

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