Neeti Palta is a known face in the Indian standup circuit. Presently, the Delhi-based comedian has embarked on a country-wide tour where she will be performing in multiple cities, with her most recent show being in Bengaluru on June 18 at Just BLR Comedy Club, Brigade Road.
“The tour has been going great so far. Both the Hyderabad and the Bengaluru shows were sold out. For the latter, we even had to add more seats. I have been performing in this city for more than ten years at this point, and it is my favourite city to perform in. I have always felt the audience here gets my humour. Sometimes I don’t even say the punchline, I just smile at them, and they understand. They are very on the ball,” shares Palta, who adds that her next show is in Nagpur on June 23 and she is greatly anticipating it since it will be her first time performing there.
The show that she is touring with is named Ulta Palta. “I genuinely feel we have all started taking ourselves far too seriously. We’re still getting out of the pandemic days also. Ulta Palta is basically me trying to make sense of this world which has gone ‘ulta’ (flipped). The show is a mix of anecdotal and observational humour along with some social commentary,” says Palta who has been performing comedy professionally for 13 years.Compared to the early 2010s, when citizens still held the notion that standup is a ‘YouTube’ thing and not an inherently live art form, Palta feels the audience is now somewhat halfway there. “Well, thanks to YouTube many of the views we get in our videos have converted into ticket sales. There are always those people who don’t have access to live shows, so their only way is to watch through YouTube. But then there are also those people who want to watch everything for free (laughs),” explains the Delhi-based comedian.
Sharing her personal philosophy about comedy, that ‘nothing is funnier than the truth’, Palta says, “Every time someone takes offence to a joke, I always wonder if maybe they need to ponder whether they are being offended by the joke or the truth in the joke. It is a very fine line. And comedy doesn’t just come out of thin air, it comes from certain observations and experiences.”
Palta has also been a judge in the popular reality show Comicstaan’s seasons 2 and 3. She feels the comedy fan in her always got in the way of her judgements. “I am a big fan of comedy. In the beginning, I used to completely forget that I have to judge. I just listened to them like a member of the audience. I was naturally enjoying or not enjoying the set, and then suddenly everyone was looking at me for my opinion, and I used to go like ‘Oh no, one second’ (laughs). I hope my advice helped the comedians become better,” she concludes, mentioning that she is presently working on two shows, one of which is a dark comedy tentatively titled Wicked.