Age of the Vettiyar trolls 

KOCHI: For Sreekanth Vettiyar, humour has been a life-long addiction. The 31-year-old content creator who hails from Mavelikkara in Alappuzha is well-known to meme and spoof lovers across Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. “Once when I was in school, I said something funny and all my friends laughed. I remember thinking to myself back then if anyone would laugh at my jokes,” quips Sreekanth. After spending almost six months working a mundane job in Saudi Arabia, and another six months ‘wandering the desertscapes’ of Dubai, he woke up one day to realise that he wasn’t living his best life. 

“Fast forward to now, I wake up everyday wondering how to make people laugh. I haven’t felt more alive,” he says. Sreekanth’s tryst with memes started sometime around 2014 while he was a mediator for International Chalu Union (ICU) — one of the first internet troll pages to gather popularity in Malayalam. “It was after the pandemic hit that I felt the need to do something interesting and branch out. I started making small spoofs and uploading them on my Facebook. Eventually, it picked up better than I had expected,” he says.

Sreekanth’s knack for hilarious anecdotes that can lighten up even the most sombre conversation is quite reflective of his ability to find comedy in everyday things, and to laugh at that which may seem obvious to the rest of the world. One of his best loved clips, an unboxing video by Kalantaka (the hindu god of death), ridicules the repetitive format of phone unboxing videos we are all tired of. “My mom wanted a new phone, and I sat one day looking for a good one. That was how I zeroed in on a different kind of unboxings online,” quips Sreekanth. 

A content creator’s best asset is a team that works in sync. For Sreekanth, this support comes from his friends including Noel Thomas on the edits and Gabriel Francis behind the camera. The team is now in the works of ‘KGF 2’, a spoof to the prequel to the action movie that is bound to release next month. “Cinema is my biggest motivation. I hope to make a good script and take off in the industry one day.”