Half an hour with Guna Kannan can leave you laughing over the most mundane of things that you didn’t possibly think made for a joke! The bonus here is, you get half an hour more with Sai Anand cracking you up with more relatable jokes!
Your weekend is made if you sit in the audience and watch these two immensely talented stand-up comics entertaining you with topics ranging from daily routines, work life stress, insane traffic, relationships woes, and any other thing that one can think of, except politics. “That (politics), we don’t touch,” begins Guna, laughing.
Titled Guna Sai Live, the upcoming performance this weekend is going to be the duo’s 10th show. “We have been doing this for the past one year. The show mainly focuses on providing variety. We have anecdotes, observational jokes, topical jokes — all in Tamil. I believe we all ‘see’ things but maybe not all of us ‘observe’ all the time. What both, Sai and I, try to do is put a perspective to it,” says Guna, adding, “I will give you a simple example. We all go to malls, but have we ever wondered why they have security guards at the entrance? I feel like mall is a scam, because those security guards most often than not, will never check you. They may check sometimes only if you have a bag, but what if I am a terrorist without a bag, entering the mall? Then again, we all like to go to the mall, but once we are there, we like the things that are available outside!”
Turning mundane into funny is not as easy as Guna makes it sound. We thus ask him, with so many stand-up artistes choosing the same route, how does he manage to keep his jokes relevant. “There is no one way, or process or a tonic for this. The only fact is, 10 people see one same thing in 10 different ways. So, while the subjects may be similar, the perspectives and presentations differ. That’s where the trick lies. Every artiste has to find that one uniquely different thread that connects him/her to the audience,” he explains.
Though the duo is going to repeat similar jokes in their 10th show, both Guna and Sai are also adding some fresh ones.
For Sai, who started with doing shows in English, it is the senior comedians who inspired him to shift to Tamil. “Tamil comedy has come a long way. Though some of my jokes are still in Tanglish, I am most comfortable telling jokes in Tamil,” he says. Sai is going to be focussing on lingo that the GenZ uses — like ‘people pleaser’ and ‘ghosting’ and decode what they mean. “Basically, these are ideas that always existed, but now we have new terms for them,” says Sai, who is also a writer.
Guna, who is now full-time into stand-up comedy, started with open mics during college. “I am the kind of person who does not stick to things if they bore me. I quit engineering college in three months; I ended a relationship in 20 days. Stand-up is the only thing I have been doing for this long — since four-and-a-half years,” he says, laughing.
Tickets start at Rs 299.
May 11, 6.30 pm.
At IDAM, Kodambakkam.
Email: rupam@newindianexpress.com
X: @rupsjain
