From #KennySing4Me to Dubai Comedy Week, Kenny Sebastian continues to hit the right notes
His disarming sincerity and uniquely refreshing sense of relatable, easy humour are just some of the many reasons people flock in massive crowds to catch a Kenny Sebastian set.
Just kidding, it’s his angelic voice and ability to seamlessly integrate music into his sets without missing a beat. Just kidding (Or am I?)
To understand Kenny’s humour one simply needs to look at his origin story, #KennySing4Me. What started as an intention to create content and challenge himself quickly blew up into the funniest thing on the internet that year.
“I used to take words from people on Twitter with the hashtag on Sunday morning. And I used to record and compose a song and release a video for it by evening on YouTube. I did it for about a year and created around 30 songs,” Kenny explains.
“It was extremely difficult, but the audience enjoyed and loved it. And after a point, I got so many entries that I couldn’t handle it anymore. But yeah, I think it was an exercise of like, trying to be regular, with content, challenging myself, and also creating a custom experience for my audience.”
But music and humour are just a few of the weapons the multitalented Kenny possesses in his arsenal. From being in a band to releasing an album, dabbling in graphic design to corporate video shoots, wedding photography, painting, editing, theatre – the list is seemingly endless.
With this much to his credit, how then did stand-up comedy happen and what made it stick?
A happy accident as it so happens. While at a college competition in Mumbai for acapella, friends nudged him to participate in a parallel stand-up competition. The win and accompanying high was all it took, and as Kenny puts it, it felt like the universe just clicked.
But it’s a bit of pain and pleasure, Kenny adds, highlighting the vulnerable underbelly of the comedic space.
“I mean, it’s not very good for your mental health to go on stage every time, and people don’t realise stand-up is very hard to write. Unlike other professions, with stand-up, the draft stage happens in front of an audience. So every year we go through this horrific process of being vulnerable onstage, writing a joke and getting rejected. But still, I can’t imagine not doing stand-up or doing anything else. It’s a very rewarding process.”
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And rewarding it certainly has been, with Kenny having created several series that have left audiences in splits. From his Chaitime Comedy sets to a hilarious special on Prime, the artist continues to dabble in various formats and birth content that feels refreshingly original yet continually relatable.
Of course, one cannot speak of Kenny Sebastian without acknowledging the viral video dissecting ‘Middle Class Restaurant Problems’ from his early days at the Canvas Laugh Club in Mumbai. As one of the first faces to lead the comedy revolution to what it is today in India, the artist’s core USP has always been his knack for illuminating regular Indian life with razor-sharp wit.
With one of his most recent outings being as a judge on the hugely popular reality show ‘Comicstaan’, the comedian has come a long way from being a new face in a new space to now mentoring younger comics onto the scene. As the space has evolved, he notes the increasing legitimacy of comedy as a profession in India, and the understanding audiences have come to have.
Explaining the same he says, “Before it was just like, ‘Oh, you’re funny you must be doing slapstick or making faces or doing impressions’. Now, they understand that comedy can be nuanced and have many variations. And for new comedians in India, they know that there is a viable professional system in place. When we started 14 years ago, we were just figuring it out. Now the younger ones know you need to have an online persona, a show attached, you need to write a special, you need to put clips, you need to do brand collaborations, you need to have a manager. We didn’t know all of that. We just kind of figured it out. So I think it’s very cool.”
But while nuanced comedy might be what the audience seeks, delivering the same without legal complications has become an increasingly complicated job in the country, Kenny notes.
“We live in a very complicated system with consequences to statements made, sometimes even legal. Either it’s enforced by people in power, or normal citizens can go and file complaints. And it’s a problem we’ve been facing for years. It affects all sorts of art. It’s very unfair to be like, why artists aren’t pushing boundaries when the consequences are sometimes jail time. Ideally, we should strive for a society where ideas and statements are not punished with dire consequences of legality. Actions should be, but not exchange of ideas and statements at obligated chick to explode on stage,” he says.
Even with an impressive body of work to show for nearly two decades of laughs, Kenny has far from stopped exploring. His podcast Simple Ken is testament to the same, having curated a starry list of speakers and a loyal following in a relatively short period.
While the artist will forever love creating shorter content to cater to skittish attention spans, the content’s generic and universal nature made Kenny explore something more niche.
“So when I started the one-hour podcast I wanted to talk about stuff that has nothing to do with comedy. Because obviously I’m more than a comedian and have other sides. And I noticed the community that would sit through one hour of this content was very, very different from the audience that just likes to watch 60-second reels with clickbaity titles. And I am really proud of this audience.”
However, cultivating a certain kind of audience comes with its drawbacks, namely in terms of funding his passion project. A bit of a Catch-22, where the artist needs a bigger audience to continue producing the podcast, but doesn’t want to lose the nuanced audience. With all that going on and on the back of a massively successful show at Dubai Comedy Week, Kenny now has his sights set on captivating audiences by doing what he does best – interweaving music and comedy with an entirely musical special.
And for ardent fans of him or those looking for a truly new take on laughs, this one’s bound to be a blast!
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