“If you’d have come five minutes later, the show would have ended...and so would I,” a stand-up comic says to a latecomer at the show. It’s a regular set up of a funny night out, except this is no ordinary stand up comic. Pooran Issarsingh is one of terminally ill debutant comics performing for her well-wishers, talking about her impending death. Pooran, as well as Janice Powell, Narendra Mhatre, and Manudevi Singh were brought on stage by Indian Association of Palliative Care. The video of the show, #LaughAtDeath, aims to show that death needn’t be a touchy topic.
After hitting the Internet on Thursday, the video quickly went viral, and climbed YouTube’s popular charts. The four amateur comics were trained by city comics Kunal Kamra, Punit Pania, Kashyap Swaroop, and Vinay Sharma.
Kunal tells us that he went through a gamut of emotions, when he got down to working on the project. “This was an emotional roller coaster,” he sighs. “Every time I met a patient, I would be messed for the rest of the evening. I couldn’t think of anything else. And, imagine, I had to give them jokes about them dying. Just to slip in jokes like ‘I’m so old, my relatives are discussing who gets my sarees after I’m gone’ was an experience.”
However, he tells us that the participants were nonchalant throughout the entire exercise. “They took to the jokes very easily; they were cooler than I expected them to be,” he says.
Pooran reveals that most of the writing came from within her. “It came out of my own heart, and I’m very happy to do it, keeping a cool mind.” A former income tax lawyer, who was given merely 48 hours to live last year, after having been diagnosed with a critical stage of dengue adds, “At 85, this video has made me feel like a star.”
Punit Pania explains that joking about death is a big deal in a country like India. “Here, half the time is spent in denial, when there’s a chronic ailment. When this first came to me, it sounded audacious. We make jokes everyday, and we know that in India, if there’s anything a little too dark, people don’t digest it.” But that did not mean making jokes about their impending death was easy on the comics. “There has to be a certain amount of detachment when you write jokes. It’s a joke at the end of the day, but here we were aiming a bit higher. Being conscious of that, and knowing despite the person being cool with it, they are going to die, we were a little careful too. We had kid gloves on.”
Kunal says he just sat and discussed their day the first time he met the comics. “I asked them about their likes and dislikes, their interests and more. Accordingly, I wrote jokes they could deliver. We wrote in a language they wanted to talk in, they were comfortable with. They delivered it like they would talk to a friend,” he tells us, cracking up while thinking of his favourite joke. “One of it was when Manudevi says ‘When I first got lung cancer, mujhe laga main nahi bachoongi. I looked around and realised bachega toh koi bhi nahi.’ I thought it was funny, yet so true.
Punit adds that once you see the patients themselves taking so easily to the idea of death, it becomes a comfortable topic. “Patients want to talk openly about it, but they see people close to them cringing about it and go into a shell about it. When doctors say, ‘Please ask the patient to wait outside’, it starts from there.”
Pooran, who’s in consensus with Punit, has a very pragmatic take on humour and the idea of death. “One must laugh at one’s self; only then will people laugh with you. Otherwise you live alone. When I was asked to do this, I thought to myself ‘why not, let me do it.’ See, whatever has to happen, will happen. One has to just keep a cool mind,” she signs off.
— With inputs from Somudra Banerjee
