All India Bakchod, a startup that lives and sells humour
It is quite an achievement in India if your YouTube channel shows up as the first result when you Google for ‘bakchod’. The word ‘bakchod’ basically refers to an Indian slang used for a person who talks nonsense. No dispute here, sex, politics and religion are the most used (and abused) topics during the cherished ‘chai-time’ conversations in India.
Someone had to pick these discussions from the dining tables, offices, classrooms and restaurants.
Enter Tanmay Bhat and Gursimran Khamba, the co-founders of All India Bakchod, a startup that lives and sells humour.
India’s foremost comedy podcast, All India Bakchod has come a long way since they started in 2012. The duo is driven by their innate ability and curiosity to explore human follies. It seems to have worked every single time but how was it the very first time? What triggered or rather annoyed Tanmay Bhat and Gursimran Khamba to take their sanity (or insanity) to the nation, err… people?
All India Bakchod is now two years old. Last year, a majority of their work was around producing funny podcasts. “I owe a lot of AIB’s growth to OML and NH7. They’re the only people we’ve met who ‘get it’,” says Tanmay.
The making of AIB slaughtered many peaceful nights of Tanmay’s neighbors with the all-night yelling. It even tested his mother’s patience. Tanmay considers Khamba and himself more or less on the same plane on most things. As an afterthought he adds, “Khamba is less frazzled and gives less of a fuck than me in general.”
For an artist, the whole world is a stage and for a comedian the whole world is funny. Tanmay says, “I’m an absolutist when it comes to what’s funny and what’s not. I think everything has the potential to be funny. Even cancer (Look up Tig Notaro), or religion (Look up Bill Maher, George Carlin, Bill hicks), and of course even death (Look up Louis CK).”
So what do AIB joke about?
Sex, politics, religion and tons more. We do stand up, sketch on stage, along with podcasts and a radio show, and now YouTube videos too. We literally do comedy every day of the week. So we get bored easily. Which is why the channel also has a bunch of really random ideas on it and all of next year we will just experiment with whatever we feel like,” answers Tanmay.
If not comedy, Tanmay would have been a writer. In fact, he’s still a writer and probably will always be one. Travelling on the same boat, I realized that at times, we over think for our readers about giving them all the joys of the world. Well, at least that explains my request to Tanmay to share a joke, even after a long interview. “Ha! So here’s a funny joke. This one time, these random dudes wrote to me to get an interview, and in the end they expected me to just tell them a joke — like I’m some kind of show monkey. Isn’t that hilarious? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.” .
