Girlfriends, marijuana and the bhaajiwali are great fodder for funny songs, say city musicians who know how to crack up an audience. Stand up comic and Alien Chutney frontman Vir Das hopes to find a regular slot for bands that can get some laughs
Girlfriends, marijuana and the bhaajiwali are great fodder for funny songs, say city musicians who know how to crack up an audience. Stand up comic and Alien Chutney frontman Vir Das hopes to find a regular slot for bands that can get some laughs
Weu00a0are watching Malegaon ka Superman, the low-budget laugh riot that was born after Malegaon ke Sholay became a raging hit, at musician Sidd Coutto's Bandra residence. "Is he wearing Hawai chappals?" we ask Coutto, who laughs out hard when he looks at the stick figure lead actor being bashed up. Coutto manages to sputter between laughs, "Yes, and look at his naada (drawstring)." Next up, an episode of South Park, the American animated series, where Stan, Kyle and Eric take the mickey out of err Mickey Mouse and The Jonas Brothers. Coutto's hard drive is crammed with more funnies.
Coutto's stage craft has no craft -- he has as much fun on stage as he does when he is laughing at South Park -- whether he's leading his two-year-old band Tough on Tobacco or playing drums for the Hindi rock band Ghalat Family. The musician pulls off some heartbreak songs like Don't Leave Me Behind with fun at the core of his performance. "The songs on my albums have some serious lyrics. My performances are funny because I'm retarded," adds Coutto as an explanation.
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Shock value
You are not sure how to react when you hear Frank Zappa sing that he's a sexual spastic for the first time or when you watch an Ali G video from his film Indahouse. There's pure shock, for one. Shock works for Delhi band Emperor Minge who don't want to be lumped as a comedy rock band. Emperor Minge bandleader Stefan Kaye calls it absurdist humour. The band once set up a mock police raid at the end of the show. "Some people were uptight and a lawyer in the audience went up to one of the cops and gave him his card," says Kaye. Finally, the main cop, incidentally an opera singer, went up to the microphone and sang a line off Arthur Sullivan's The Policeman Song: 'A policeman's laugh is not a happy one' which is when the audience was let into the joke.
Ask him how he gets his ideas and Kaye replies, "They just fester around." For one of The Medicine Shows, the band's performance art project which includes bizarre sketches, Kaye roped in New York-based actor Shelli Koffman to play a psychopathic homicidal woman in a psychiatric ward to sing Mad About The Boy. The song written by Brit playwright Noel Coward talks about a young woman's unrequited love for 20s Italian pin-up Rudolph Valentino. "Shelli does a very convincing nut job," says Kaye cheekily, adding, "A lot of people didn't laugh."u00a0u00a0u00a0
Dark does it
Emperor Minge can slow roast their shows on dark humour. There are few masters of this genre. New Zealand-based two-member band Flight of The Conchords is one of them. Macabre lines (The Humans are Dead), intelligent racist jokes (The Racist Dragon), plain, dumb-funny songs (Jenny) -- they've done it all.u00a0
Sex tricks
Stand up comic and Alien Chutney vocalist Vir Das agrees that sex jokes are the bestsellers. "It's very easy," he says, "It's fashionable to say that sex sells but it's also true that sex is a theme that's been tried a lot andnot all sex jokes sell. Bhaajiwaali graphically details an orgy with a vegetable vendor. "There's no research involved here. No sex with bhajiwaalas or waalis," laughs Das.
Three year-old humour metal band Workshop, Mumbai metal band Demonic Resurrection's side project, is probably the only band that has shaped its craft and act to the last detail, including its look on stage. When they performed I Came, an anthem on masturbation, the audience at The Comedy Store went ballistic. "We get a lot of ideas from just jamming. The track Garba Ga*ndu happened when Hamza (Kazi, the band's drummer) played garba beats and then mashed it up with death metal," says Workshop vocalist Sahil Makhija. "It started when we made up some lyrics on the spot at KC College. The crowd went mad."
It was Kazi who suggested that they form a humour band, considering they could work up a riot with junk lyrics. "We got a fair amount of flak from metal fans in the beginning but this isn't the audience we are targeting anyway. We are on stage for the college audience," says Makhija, who recalls how a band at IIT Roorkee even covered a Workshop hit Bunty Aur Mallika. Workshop's toughest challenge was winning over the unresponsive diners at Hard Rock Caf ufffd. "If metal bands don't like something, they'd just stand there, glare at you and eventually boo you off the stage. The dinner audience just doesn't react, so we were happy when we cracked that," says Makhija.u00a0u00a0u00a0
Wit's end
Playwright Anuvab Pal who has written and directed comedies such as Dial India 1888 for which Coutto scored the music, says, "Comic bands or music with comedy seems to be quite trendy now. New Zealand duo Flight of the Conchords, David O' Doherty and Demetri Martin have both won at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe but do folk comedy. What's mainly funny in their comic music are the lyrics."
And it's the twist of phrase that turned I'm A Chinky But It's OK -- Vir Das's take on North East Indians, featuring Indian Idol finalist Meiyang Chang -- into a winner. Das tells us that the song came to be on the sets of the Bollywood film Badmaash Company, which featured both of them. "Chang's role in the film mocks narrow-eyed people and we just took off from there when we were jamming in my van. We'd shoot in the mornings and perform with Alien Chutney at night and rehearse whenever we had the time. So it was quite mad," says Das.
Defunct metal band Pin Drop Violence's bassist Rohit Pereira became notorious for his hilarious P-Man show much before he kicked off his band Khiladi. "I didn't set out to form a humour band. I think we're a funny punk rock band," says Pereira who swears that none of his stage banter is rehearsed. Give It Back and This is Sparta are two Khiladi tracks that never fail to have the audience in splits. So, what's the formula? "The ability to laugh at yourself is the biggest key to making music fun and funny."
The handbook
How to break into the humour music scene
Gag and gig guide from Vir Das for aspiring humour bands:
>>u00a0Be original
>> Write relevant lyrics
>> Don't try it if you are not a good musician
>> Try and surround yourself with infinitely more talented musicians, like I have
>> Have a good time on stage
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