If you’re on twitter, chances are that you’ve got your timeline neatly categorized into various heads and sub heads – political, news portals, the self obsessed lot, the explicit ones, the Chinese and Greek proverb copier, celebrities and, of course, the funny ones, among others.
Now the trick to getting the best timeline is to have a healthy mix of all of the above – the not so desirable categories like Chinese and Greek proverb copiers, the self obsessed lot and the celebrities just so you can have something to make snide asides about. The news portals to keep afloat the pretense of being constantly updated and the political ones so you can sound intelligent at the next beer tweetup, of course. The funny ones, however, help in making twitter a non-stop laugh riot and a 24 hour party, if you’ve worked the time-zones well enough.
Indian comics on twitter have exploited every socio-political opportunity to poke fun at authorities and audiences alike. Take the Commonwealth Games for example, the opening ceremony saw non stop tweeting of snide commentary about Kalmadi’s speech, Manmohan Singh and Pratibha Patil’s lack of expressions and Sheila Dikshit’s senility at suggesting that there have been no power cuts in Delhi in the last two years. The Ayodhya Verdict, too, led to much inspired commentation – quoting Rohan Joshi (@MojoRojo), “There is only one way to make everybody forget about the Babri Masjid; Make repairing it the BMC's job. Another hot topic, of course, is Arnab Goswami. Rakesh Jhunjhunwaala, who claism to be God and to have invented twitter, and amasses a follower base of over 14 thousand twitter users, once tweeted “Arnab Goswami has never finished a sentence his whole life because everytime he starts to speak he ends up interrupting himself.” No subject is taboo, no issue too sacrosanct for these comics, and they will use all ammunition, from ND Tiwari to Rakhi Sawant, to tickle your funny bone (no puns intended, of course).
A close look at the viral retweets and the most favourited tweets gives you a clear idea about how comics are winning the popularity contest we lovingly refer to as Twitter. A popular name among the twitterati is Gursimran Khamba – known to his followers as @gkhamba. When Khamba started tweeting, he had a modest following of about 150 people, mostly only the people he knew personally. Today, over six thousand people are regularly updated on his irreverent musing on everything topical and a majority of them are retweeted by hundreds of people. “I’ve always had a talent for making snide remarks about everything. In person, people tend to get offended pretty often by those, but apparently when you do the same to celebrities, it’s funny,” says Khamba.
Once on Twitter, Khamba started writing for popular spoof website Faking News. This, he says, is what initially increased his visibility. “Twitter makes it easy to be politically incorrect – sure you lose a few followers every time you touch a taboo topic like politics or religion, but you have to remember that with each unfollow you’re separating the wheat from the chaff,” he points out.
Writer and stand up comic Rohan Joshi (@mojorojo), with about five thousand followers, thinks twitter, “is like an online soapbox, you can say exactly what you want and you’kll end up attracting like minded people.” Wannabe space cowboy, TV professional and suspected Blackberry Boy from the popular Vodafone Ad, Dharmesh Gandhi points out how “sometimes people think I'm funny when I'm just talking about my day-to-day life experiences. Sadly, they are full of misery for me. But as they say, ‘Everything is funny till it happens to you’.”
Saad Akhtar, Site Architecture specialist at Naukri.com by day and maker of FlyYouFools comic by night (with close to 7 thousand followers on twitter), agrees with his fellow comics, asserting that “the quality of comedy depends greatly on the medium and the lack of censorship on twitter makes it an ideal breeding ground for wit and sarcasm.” Rohan Roushan, ex-TV journalist and now Pagal Patrakar of the Faking News fame, thinks that the 140 character constraints have pushed people to become sharper, more articulate and, therefore, wittier. “Even though you have the follower count as a vanity box, twitter has the tendency of being more egalitarian – everyone has the same space to speak their mind,” he adds. In a certain socio-cultural context, of course. But to his 19 thousand odd followers, the pagal patrakars musing and writings provide much food for thought.
Is there, however, a flipside to winning the race to be most liked – the pressure to keep up with your follower’s expectations, perhaps? Twitter is, after all, a strangely personal medium where “relationships” can only be sustained with conversations and regular interactions – this is how you grow your follower base and how you sustain it. “If I don’t feel like making jokes one day, or decide to comment on things in a not so obviously funny manner, suddenly followers will tell me I’m having an off day or that I’ve lost the funny somewhere,” Khamba adds.
The social networking site might just have changed the face of comedy, for professionals and amateurs alike. Even though most of the content on your timeline’s funny alter ego might be too politically incorrect and too edgy to be reproduced in print or on television, twitter is probably making people more open to comic outrage.
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(An edited version of this article appeared in The Hindustan Times on November 13th, 2010)
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