Mid-Day Anniversary Special | ‘The Habitat is a crowd that never lies to me’: Vir Das

Trust Vir Das to pull off the quirkiest audition hustle. No standing in queues outside casting offices, no e-mails, no agents. Circa 2007 — it was just Das and a DVD of his ‘comedy special’, as he pitched the idea of stand-up comedy to a country that had yet to wake up to the phenomenon. Armed with three cameras and his own savings, he shot his first stand-up special in the heart of Mumbai. The show was called Viragra — the starting point of a career that would lead him to an International Emmy Award in 2023.

“I shot it with three technicians. Vidyun Singh, the programming head at the India Habitat Centre, gave me the go-ahead to do a live show. I had a lakh in my account and spent R50–60,000 shooting it. There was a guy called Kapil, who ran Media Pro in Lokhandwala Market that made DVDs. My friend Kabir Singh designed the sound. I directed it, but ‘directing’ is a high compliment to pay for what that was,” smiled Das. It took him six months to write the special, another three months to ready the DVD, and only a day to supply it to all the video libraries from Mahim to Andheri. “The first place I went to was a video library called Sarvodaya on Ambedkar Road in Bandra because all the directors would get their DVDs from there. I went to three libraries in Juhu, about five in Andheri, and three in Bandra.”

A picture of the DVD that Vir Das had made

The plan was unusual, but effective. “I went to audition for Mumbai Salsa [2007]. On the way out, I left a DVD on Vikram Bhatt’s desk asking him to watch it. By the time I got to Bandra, he called and said, ‘You’re the hero’.” The DVDs also made it to casting directors, and in 2010, he got an audition call for Aamir Khan’s Delhi Belly (2011). “Somebody had sent a DVD to Ado Mukherjee, who was a casting director on Delhi Belly. I think people connected with the idea of being a ‘weird ass’, and then I formed a company with that name,” he said.

Between 2009 and 2011, as he bagged roles in movies, Das also led the growth of stand-up comedy in India. He has a special connection with The Habitat in Khar, where he would perform a lot of his early material. To date, he performs there every time he is testing new material. “Every comic needs to be sharpened by a crowd who won’t lie. The Habitat is my crowd that never lies. When I was starting out, there was hardly a stable scene for comedy. The comics and the audience have together built the scene from scratch. The early audience there gave me confidence.”

Two decades on stage, sold-out shows, and six Netflix specials later, Das still has one particular moment as his favourite. “When the lights go down before I go on stage, you hear the crowd shuffle. You hear them put their phones away, adjust in their seats. That moment scares the daylights out of you because you realise 12,000 people are shuffling with expectations.”