Comedian Anirban Dasgupta
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
“Imagine if a football match was a comedy show; at the start there would be no way of knowing who the winner would be at the end of an hour,” says Anirban Dasgupta, over cellphone from Mumbai, attempting to clarify his newest present Cry Daddy with out freely giving an excessive amount of.
This week will see the get up comedian from Mumbai carry out at Soho Theatre in London, UK. “Cry Daddy marks the first time I am presenting an experimental show; up till now it has been pure stand up inspired by politics and personal experiences. That has been the pattern so far.”
With Cry Daddy, “I feel I have unlocked something new,” says Anirban, including, “It is a game with the audience and me, all the way down to the last joke. The idea behind it was to go beyond regular stand up and present an immersive show.”
Unlike traditional routines the place there’s a restricted interplay with the viewers, totally on a one-on-one foundation, with a random member of the group, in Cry Daddy, Anirban sees the viewers, “as an unit that is playing against me, irrespective of its demographics. I see the audience as one.”
As with most stay reveals, Anirban says he works off the audiences’ solutions with no approach of figuring out how the night will pan out and has devised a degree system to assist every workforce rating, full with yellow playing cards and the like.
He says the thought for the present germinated through the years whereas performing with worldwide acts and analysing crowd make-up. He fleshed it out on the Melbourne Comedy Festival earlier this yr and adopted it up with trial reveals in India from April.
The 30-odd reveals he has held since then have been a win-win for each events, he says. At a current present in Bengaluru, the group obtained fairly aggressive, upping their rating (not at all times truthfully), decided to beat him at his personal sport, laughs Anirban.
After greater than a decade of reveals the place he has loosely labored off scripted materials, “or at least had an idea” of what he was going to say, Cry Daddy with its lack of an outlined construction, “felt as though I was giving away control to the audience.”
And but, he says, “This is the most attentive way of building a stand up show, because the audience feel they are part of this game, and after a point, they want to beat me. Plus, with this version no two shows are ever alike; every show is fresh and different.”
Anirban Dasgupta is again in Bengaluru with Cry Daddy on October 19. Details on his Instagram deal with
Published – September 30, 2025 08:56 pm IST
