Yash Bhardwaj – Just for Laughs

Indian comedian Yash Bhardwaj, 30, talks the UAE comedy scene, curating his shows under Flamingo Live, and taking his show Down Under

How and why did you get into standup comedy?
During my three years of university in India, I did performing arts; I was running a theatre team. We represented the university’s cultural team. So, I was always on stage, and I used to write and direct, satire and a lot of humour.

I just really missed being on stage and doing what I love to do, which is basically entertaining people and making people laugh. I thought standup comedy was the easiest route for me to get back on stage. I got my first chance to try it in India and initially, it was so bad.

It took me a while to start in Dubai. I joined a batch of four people in Abu Dhabi for a comedy workshop and a good thing that came out of that is that I got into the habit and got the discipline to write humour. I learned that once you have material, you’re itching to go on stage. So, here I am.

How has your comedy career grown? Have you found that it’s been like a steady incline or have things really started speeding up in the last few years?
I honestly feel that progression is completely correlated to your efforts. When I started in 2017 to 2019, I was just doing it for the glamour of going on stage, getting that attention, and telling my friends that I’m doing comedy.

I think I got really serious about comedy in 2020 when I lost my job, then in 2021 the first thing I wanted to do was to run comedy nights, so that’s where Flamingo Live came into the picture. I started producing shows so that I could have stage time. So again, from doing comedy for the glamour, it became a need. I really wanted to make it in showbiz and that became my mindset.

Since 2021, I’ve measured my growth by how funny I am compared to a year ago. Once you start growing your art form, you start getting new gigs. I host all my shows and I feel that has made me a really good comedian. People have started reaching out to me to ask if I’d like to close a show or be a headliner.

I feel, at the moment, that Dubai doesn’t have the infrastructure yet for a comedian to make it really big. I’ve had to take my comedy outside of Dubai. I took my material to Australia, where it was received really, really well and I think that’s the validation I really wanted.

Being in Dubai, you don’t realise how well you’re doing until you’re in a developed comedy market. I did really well at all the lineup shows because I was such a fresh voice in Australia. The lineup was full of white Australians and then I was this brown guy living in Dubai and I have all these stories which were so unique.

I did my solo [the show Man From Brown Under] in Adelaide. I think out of three or four runs, two runs when really, really well considering nobody even knew me, and my venue was far away from the main festival area as well. So, I’m really happy with the way things progressed and that’s why I’m really looking forward to doing more of these festivals. The progression has definitely come from the confidence that I have in myself as a comedian.

A lot of your comedy is very personal, you touch on the humour of being brown and growing up brown. Do you just write what you feel, or do you feel like sometimes you have to be a little bit sensitive to how your audience might take your jokes? How do you structure the topic of race, for example?
A lot of my jokes are self-deprecating, so I’m not usually worried about how the audience will take it. As a whole, they can relate to it. But, when I am writing I’m very conscious about it whenever I’m doing race-specific jokes. I do a lot of contrast. For example, let’s say I grew up in an Indian household, some of the audience would relate because we had the same parents. I just make it funny, but I’ll end with a self-deprecating punch line. So, it’s all good. All the jokes are contrasting your culture with mine. I think that’s where the humour comes from. That’s where the education bit comes from.

Where do you see the comedy scene in Dubai going for the remainder of this year? What would you like to see happen in the UAE comedy scene in 2024?
As of now, I can count the number of comedians who can do 15 minutes plus on my fingers, and it’s not a very big number compared to any other market. I honestly feel by the end of this year, that number is going to double because of the growth that we are seeing in general in new comics, and the quality that’s coming in. I feel when we started there were not many great comedians around, so we were also not scaling at that pace.

But I think now with the new comedians there are great new acts in the lineups, and everyone knows they need to up their game because we’re seeing good comedy. So, from just the quality of comedy, I think that’s definitely something where I see things happening in Dubai.

I really feel that we could do well with some recognition from streaming platforms, whether it’s TV, talk shows, or radio. A streaming platform is definitely on my personal agenda. I am probably going to reach out to multiple streaming platforms to see if we can curate a Dubai lineup show. I think that that’d be really great for the comedy scene in general.

Where does Flamingo Live fit in?
I’ve been running shows under Flamingo Live, and I currently have three to four venues that give me stage time. I can also give other comedians stage time, and I’m very thankful that we work with really good venues which is instrumental in everybody’s growth. I make sure that comedians are getting the stage time and that my venues are happy and making money out of comedy.

I think that’s also a very, very important part that nobody talks about. I know it’s the elephant in the room, but Flamingo Live definitely aims to make sure that the venues are making a decent amount of money out of our shows. Otherwise, they have no vested interest in supporting us. I want to become the biggest comedy promoter and they give us that space. We respect that they’ve given us their operating space. Our job is to make sure that the audience gets quality comedy. That’s why I curate most of my shows. We are the audience first, the comedian second. If there’s no audience, there is no comedy. That’s what we do comedy for, right? Finally, I make sure that the venues make enough out of comedy from the revenue point of view, usually with new people walking through the door.