Interview | Comedian Vir Das and his cinematic dreams

How did you begin writing The Outsider? And how has your relationship with the written word evolved over the years?

To be very honest, I was against writing this book. My agents in the U.S. called me and convinced me to do it since it felt like the natural progression of an American comic’s career path: ‘you’ve won an Emmy, now write a book’. And because my career has kind of been divided between two markets, India and the U.S., I feel like I have a lot more to do in both places. I’ll write a book about failure if you let me, about wondering how I got invited to this cool party. I’m a five-foot-eight-and-a-half inches man from Noida and I’ve gatecrashed the film industry, the stand-up comedy industry.

When you look back at the time you were working multiple jobs in the U.S., trying to make ends meet, what lessons did this phase teach you?

I’ll be honest with you; I don’t know. When you’re in the moment, you’re in the moment. I was a security guard, an underpaid intern, I was washing dishes. But it wasn’t like a ‘mindfulness’ moment, it was pure hustle. I was just trying to get enough money to buy the next pack of cigarettes or to buy a glass of wine for that cute girl I saw, and then maybe I’d get to kiss her? Actually, it’s very difficult for me to retrospect because I feel like that’s for the audience. That’s part of why writing this book was such a struggle, because I had to go back to all these phases in my life and think about them in terms of the ‘larger context’.

Your upcoming directorial debut, Happy Patel, is a spy comedy produced by Aamir Khan. As a comedian and actor, how did you deal with sitting in the director’s chair day after day? In the book you write about how your dreams have “camera angles”.

They do, I have very cinematic dreams, there’s camera angles, there’s a soundtrack. I say this with no arrogance: I don’t know yet if I am any good as a director. But I know it’s what I have been searching for. What’s great about standup is that your madness infects every breath of the audience. But that ‘flow state’ only lasts for an hour or so every time, for a standup comedian. And as an actor, I would find it frustrating to hang around a film set the entire day for maybe 45 minutes of work, 45 minutes of ‘flow state’. When I was directing Happy Patel, I felt that way for the whole day, for nine hours at a time.

Many comedians have had this time-honoured method of testing new material at smaller venues, and tweaking the jokes based on feedback. For obvious reasons, this has changed fundamentally after COVID-19. Have you found this transformation impacting your own writing and style of comedy?

COVID-19 changed my entire comedy voice. I was hiking up the side of a hill with a speaker, doing ‘Ten on Ten’, this series of YouTube videos. All of a sudden, you’re in the middle of a forest with these people, so you can’t be talking about inane shit. I was like, you know guys, we’ve hiked up the side of a hill for this, let’s talk about the country, right? It was a decent time to do political comedy because the country was on lockdown. And once I got a taste for it, there was no going back.

In India, it’s not feasible for me to do too much testing of material because I know it’ll get out… I see the phones during my shows in Delhi and Mumbai. Sometimes it’s easier to test stuff in a famous venue like the Comedy Cellar in New York, where everybody’s an assassin, where you have to be on your A-game.

Since you are on tour in America right now, I have to ask, have you worked on a Zohran Mamdani impression yet? What do you think about his Bollywood-themed campaign videos?

I have some bits worked out. Ramy (Youssef) got the gig playing Mamdani on Saturday Night Live, but all five of us brown guys got the audition call, me and Hasan (Minhaj) and Nimesh Patel and a few other guys. Look, I think he [Mamdani] is leaning into who he is. Say what you will about the current phase of America but it is, at its best, a place where strangers turn up with their stories, and where those stories get eyeballs. And he has been able to do that incredibly well, in an authentic way.