I ask Jagan Krishnan if he has come across the Australian stand-up comic Jim Jefferies’ most recent Netflix special, Intolerant.
Jefferies, known for his edgy, expletive-laden jokes, tends to divide opinions for his unapologetic content. In Intolerant, he talks about how comics work on the ‘edges of the line’, and that this line shifts as years go by. Jefferies’ reasoning adds his perspective to social media outrages over a stand-up comic’s material.
Jagan, too, finds himself in the middle of an ‘outrage’ after the 31-year-old Chennai-based stand-up comic’s recent special, Acadummy Awards - 2019 was uploaded to YouTube.
Alongside fellow comics Praveen Kumar, Manoj Prabhakar and Mervyn Rozario, Jagan roasts Tamil cinema’s not-so-glorious films of 2019, even picking a few out for funnily-labelled award categories.
The response was prompt: a day after his show was uploaded with clips going viral, a prominent musician working in Tamil cinema put out a cryptic tweet.
Loosely translated from Tamil, it reads, “...the fame and money you make by mocking someone’s work will not last”. Ask Jagan what he makes of it, and he says, “ I don’t know if the tweet was intended for me. That is something he has to clarify. I don’t know if he has seen the video also.”
Usual suspect
To provide some context, Jagan has history with Tamil film’s acclaimed music directors.
Jagan Krishnan | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
He is infamously famous for bringing a guitar on stage for one of his acts, and belting out nine different compositions of Harris Jayaraj’s from a single tune. So popular was this act that Harris, when once asked about it, responded that he could play 200 different songs of other composers from the same tune.
He has also parodied D Imman’s compositions; his observation was that Imman spins catchy songs out of phrases strung with casual, everyday use words.
“Imman attended this show Oru Time Pakalam that I did with Mervyn. He flew out to Coimbatore with his wife to watch us. I performed the act about Imman with him in the audience. He was very chill and told me he liked it. That is my biggest endorsement so far,” Jagan adds.
Trying to make sense of this intolerance within the liberal and creative arts community, with respect to a stand-up comedian’s content, is difficult. Jagan reminds us of comedian Rahul Subramanian’s tryst with the DJ community in 2018. The uproar caused by Subramanian’s performance led to his cancellation from events where DJs would play. It is, truly, a bizarre situation.
- Jagan says the reach of Tamil stand-up comedy is growing leaps and bounds.
- “In 2016, when Tanglish Comedy started open mic sessions giving preference to Tamil stand-up comics, there were hardly three or four of us. Today, there are so many people who do it casually. Mervyn [Rozario] and I too switched over from English to Tamil stand-up comedy, and if we have since been able to do our own international tours, it is because there is this change happening and people are welcoming it. The growth is there, but after the Coronavirus situation, I don’t know what is going to happen,” he says.
“When it comes to taking offence, I don’t think there are any sides [on the political spectrum] to it. Intolerance is common to all of us. A comic’s main job is to point out the absurdity in something. It could be someone’s work or an ideology, but if it is something close to you, then misunderstandings are bound to happen. As comics, we don’t expect our work to be liked by all. That would be a myopic understanding of our profession,” says Jagan.
Critical bias
However, to be in Jagan’s shoes is something his fellow comic Manoj Prabhakar would prefer.
Manoj, for the uninitiated, kicked up a storm with his harmless and rather innocent take on Telugu actor Mahesh Babu’s performance in the Tamil film Spyder, during the previous iteration of Acadummy Awards.
The blow was severe. The artistes’ unions of both film industries were involved, apologies were tendered, and even the entire show was culled from YouTube when the abuses, death threats and cyber attacks on Manoj’s family did not cease.
Jagan Krishnan | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
“We don’t claim ourselves as film critics. We only pick out the absurdity. If you watch a few YouTube reviewers, they bash the director or actor openly. We have a principle; we do no comment on the quality or calibre of the personality, only the particular work which is available in the public domain. But why it is not taken in that spirit is a whole another debate,” Jagan says, adding, “Sometimes, people tend to copy others’ reactions because they don’t know how to react. Only time will tell if they will get used to such content.”
It is an irony, and when we point it out to him Jagan merely says it is a “good observation”, but the fact is social media outrages are often reserved to when a male actor is roasted by stand-up comics. “It is an unfortunate situation. These biases exist [among audience]. A joke on a male star gets more backlash than when it is a female star,” he adds.
The quartet, Jagan notes, are not sure if they will return for another edition of the Acadummy Awards next year considering how the film industry has been on permafrost storage since lockdown began in the wake of COVID-19 outbreak. “We are also out of business,” he interjects, with a laugh.
He acknowledges there is a pop culture drought, and he points to the more than 6,00,000 views his show has racked up as proof of said drought. “Otherwise, no one would have bothered blowing up our show in this manner,” he laughs.
‘Acadummy Awards - 2019’ is streaming on YouTube.