VIEWERS FOR STAND UP SPECIALS INCREASING IN INDIA?
The majority of the streaming platforms in India had upped their game a long time ago and they started to produce a different type of content, they are trying to explore different types of stories and trying to enter into different genres, but there is one popular genre that had remained little bit unexplored or there hasn’t been any best show yet from leading streaming platforms in this genre i.e., comedy.
Ok, now we are not going to discuss the comedy series/shows or the sit-coms, we are going to concentrate only on the stand-ups. Even though there were stand-up comedians in Indian from a long back, but the boom of stand-up in India happened mostly after the ‘Sasta Internet’ era in 2016, and its base used to be mostly on YouTube where the recorded sessions with audience reactions were captured and uploaded. People love stand-ups for many reasons like spontaneity, evolved comedy, etc.., This love was the reason for the rise of many popular stand-up comedians in India.
Both the English and Hindi stand-up comedians have created their audience and were entertaining them, in the meantime the eyes of major streaming platforms fell on the stand-up comedians. Then the stand-up specials started to happen, where a comedian would perform continuously for more than an hour, for a large number of audience and it would be released on their streaming platforms.
Speaking of Hindi standup specials, Amazon prime took the lead and every major comedian had at least one special of them on Amazon Prime Video. The major boost came from Zakhir Khan where his specials like ‘Kakshya Gyarvi’, ‘Haq Se Single’ were hit’s and drawn a lot of audience to Prime Video to watch the specials. There are even English specials of Kenny Sebastian and Kanan Gill.
Amazon Prime Video took one step ahead and started a stand-up competition called ‘COMICSTAAN’ where it acts as a platform for many new comedians. The show was quite successful and the good news is that there’s going to be a Tamil ‘COMICSTAAN’ very soon which indicates that the concentration towards the regional language standups increased.
On the other hand, Netflix, which always tries to be global, has few English stand-up specials from India. As the consumption of content by the Indians increased in the lockdown, this is a very special time to bring out more comedy specials. Many audiences enjoyed the latest special from Kenny Sebastian and are even waiting for the new specials which were announced by Zakhir Khan.
There is huge scope for the growth and evolution of these specials or stand up in particular and the major streaming platforms play a huge role. A majority of the audience is craving for some desi comedy from the streaming platforms, these specials are serving that purpose right now.
Let’s hope that the comedy in the stand up’s keeps evolving continuously as it was already loved by most of the audience and also there is a great need for these specials in the regional languages as well.
