Disclaimer: Please don’t go by the title of the show, it’s click bait! That confession immediately sets the mood for our humour-filled (sometimes pausing to laugh out loud) conversation with two of city’s well-known standup comics,
Sudarsan Ramamurthy aka Soda, and Aaquib Jaleel, who will take the stage as ‘two broke guys’. Nah! They aren’t really broke; it’s the name of their show — Two Broke Guys.
“Aaquib goes up first,” says Soda. “We have known of 2 Broke Girls, but there were no two broke guys. So, we thought why not we become that,” he says laughing. “We do have some jokes about being broke but it’s really just about nostalgia, like on the lines of How I Met Your… say grandfather. We’ve been broke — I can be considered closer to being broke, because Aaquib is still finishing his Master’s (MBA),” he says.
Friends for the last seven years now, Soda and Aaquib crossed paths because of standup. They have both seen each other grow, also been broke at the same time. “Sometimes one of us is broke, and the other is laughing at the person. So we’ve seen all those ups and downs together,” says Soda, who has been working in advertising for the last decade.
Soda did standup full-time between 2017 and 2019. “But after the pandemic, I learned my lesson that job stability is also important,” he says.
Two Broke Guys is everything about daily life of two guys — relationships, family, money, and yes, a bit about being broke. What people can basically expect from the show is two guys who’ve just turned 30, and kind of trying to figure out life! “That’s it, that’s exactly it,” says Soda, as Aaquib seconds, “We don’t talk only about financial struggles but also about how we are broken as people and the things that we go through as individuals in this world.”
Aaquib tells us that he also talks a lot about what it is to be a Muslim in this country. “I talk about my identity, being a Muslim rather than the religion itself.” For him, pursuing standup was not as easy, although Aaquib has always been an outgoing person and in love with theatre. “I come from a very conservative family. A lot of the things that I did was rebellious in that nature. But with standup, one thing that I realised was that I could go up on stage and I could talk about what I wanted to talk about. I love the fact that I could go up on stage and talk about my family, to people who are strangers, because they would understand the best. And the fact that laughter was also included in this whole process made me feel like ‘oh, this is completely different’. This laughter is very addictive. That’s how it started; it’s been almost eight years now. Thankfully, I’m still doing it.”
Tickets at Rs 499.
March 29, 9 pm.
At Hibiscus Café, Injambakkam
Email: rupam@newindianexpress.com
X: @rupsjain
