Words matter. These are the best Varun Grover Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Speaking in Hindi has helped me a lot as I can tell my stories with the exact idiom in which they come to me. I think it also helps the audience when I am speaking in a language that is non-elite, so to say, as my stories are also from that perspective.
Comedy as dissent or any art form as dissent is going to be our last safety valve.
I don’t think changing minds is possible with just comedy. It’s too much to expect from your own art.
British comedian Imran Yusuf is fantastic and so is Shazia Mirza, also London-based.
I was writing stand up comedy for TV for around 5 years and just wanted to attempt it myself. Vir Das started an amateur comedians’ night in Bombay in 2009 and I went for the very first one. It was a competition and I won the first prize.
Sometimes people don’t want to laugh because it’s wrong to laugh at their own establishment.
If you start imagining an audience for yourself, you don’t do justice to the job. You fall into that trap of a self-image.
You cannot have the same kind of character again and again in every season or every stage of your life. You change, people change.
I’m okay with anybody interpreting my work anyway because I don’t take it seriously.
The best jokes take something awful and make it silly.
There’s a lot of ordinariness, and people tend to play to the same regressive tropes – sexism, patriarchy, unkindness to the oppressed. Comedy shouldn’t fall into these traps – by its very nature comedy is supposed to be edgy and anti-establishment.
I’ve stopped many things such as healthy eating. What’s the point? In this post-truth era, I feel increasingly powerless.
In general, even when I’m not doing political comedy, I want to be clever and find the least confrontational way to say the most offensive things.
I like to dissociate myself from the person I was even three hours ago. It’s a natural requirement to be a writer.
Self-censorship is the most devastating thing for an artist.
I am primarily a comedian. Sometimes I also do comedy about my cats. Now unless you find metaphors in cats, there is nothing political about those and I love doing such jokes as much as I love doing political content.
We critique all politicians who are in power, whenever there’s a talking point.
People who are privileged can take more risks because of that safety shield that privilege provides.
Revolutions can be messy but they can’t be perceived as unjust.
