A very funny man

(Published in Hindu Sunday Magazine, August 15)

He doesn’t look like a funny man, but he has an infectious chortle and that mad gleam in the eye that reveals a mind looking for a joke. And as he tells one, Don Ward’s face lights up with childlike glee, willing you, as listener, to laugh. Like the incident at the toilet in the Victoria Terminus, Mumbai’s landmark railway station; “I have a fascination for toilets all around the world,” he says, “and a great passion for architecture.” Or the startlingly short taxi ride from his hotel and the ‘attractions’ – of the female kind – that the taxi driver offered him. His favourite, considering the number of times it has been reported, is punctuated by appropriate jerks and bounces as he tells how a cabman said that the British had left India 25 years too early, before they had finished the roads.

Ward has been bumping his way along Mumbai’s crowded streets for a while now, as he goes about setting up the newest branch of his Comedy Store, India’s first ever venue for stand-up comedy. He is the producer and CEO of the company and is often called The Don, or The Godfather of Comedy. But the only bullets fired here are verbal ones that hit target with a crack of laughter and leave the audience gasping with giggles. He beams proudly as he describes the spanking new place: “It covers three floors (at a new high-end mall) and seats 300, with little sockets for your drink at each seat. There’s a bar outside and a tapas bar – Indian people like a little tapas with a drink…” and he darts into another funny story.

But it isn’t easy to tell a joke. After all, humour is so subjective. But, as Ward explains, “You have to have a funny bone. Whoever your god is sent you down to this earth saying, ‘Ok, you can have the ability to make people laugh’. It’s as simple as that – a great gift and just wonderful if you are born with it.” And using it in the right way is what matters. “You either cultivate it or you don’t. You either keep it as something to amuse people with at the office, or go on to bigger and better things, and expose your talent to the stage, television and film, which some of my team have done.” And at the base of it all, “The spoken word is all you need to make someone feel good.”

Something funny often has a story behind it that needs explanation. But, Ward makes clear, there is a difference between that and truly funny. “Insider jokes will only happen within a small group of like-minded people. Observational jokes, on the other hand, need to be on the level that you would see at the Comedy Store. The guys (in his team) absorb things quickly; their brain starts clicking and they will review and report it. And when it is reported in a way that is looking at the funny side of whatever life presents itself as, that makes us laugh at ourselves.” That, Ward believes, “is true funny humour, as opposed to a joke about your mother-in-law or the colour of someone’s skin.”

Over the years, the concept of funny has changed. “When I started the Comedy Store 30 years ago, mother-in-law jokes were all the rage,” Ward remembers. But Mumbai is a new market, so far unexplored. “This is the exciting thing for me. With no disrespect to India or Mumbai, it’s like stepping back 30 years, even though business-wise India has overtaken most of the world! It’s like déjà vu for me,” says Ward. “I think comedy will take a similar route to what happened in the UK - the stars who emerged in those early days made mistakes and corrected them and gradually crawled up the window pane as they gained the experience to become very good stand-up comedians.”

But in the rah-rahs lauding India and Mumbai, there is a scathing indictment of things locally humorous…or not. According to Ward, “The comedy here is juvenile, for a 9 or 10 year-old. It needs to come in at a much higher level, not just the custard pie-in-the-face kind of thing. That was how it was in London 30 years ago, when the big names in comedy did structured jokes, mother-in-law jokes, sexist jokes, racist jokes and so on.” Those are no-nos today. “That is what I set the platform up for with the Comedy Store – non sexist, non-racist humour. I told my team to lay off the religion, leave the Buddha alone, leave the sacred cows alone - even though there are no ‘sacred cows’ in the UK”, he chuckles. “The Comedy Store in the UK was the only place you could go to and hear bad things about the government (especially Margaret Thatcher) and laugh about it. It would be nice to take the government here apart, but we have to know more about it first!”

His choice of Mumbai was serendipity. “Everybody was looking to the north of England, so I thought I would look East, which was India. I looked at Delhi but didn’t feel it there - I didn’t appreciate the way they treated people and I found the class distinction hard to deal with. So I decided to look at Mumbai – you just FEEL it here! It’s like Manchester, with all sorts of people, fun, family, the excitement of the movie industry, business sense, entrepreneurial spirit – I couldn’t find anything wrong with the city, and the people are fantastic: if you have a bicycle, you have a business; if you don’t have a bicycle, you have a head!”

The language will not be a problem, Ward insists. “We will have a mix of English and Hinglish, eventually all Hindi. I intend to bring in six or eight boys and girls, to be hosts who speak the local language and can invite guests and steer along the evening. One night a week will be for locals, with an international compere. The rest of the week we will have poetry, music, comedy, etc.” There will be six shows of international comedy, and then some local talent. And who knows, “there could be a diamond in the crowd – the next big star who will eventually make it to the big time!”

The British are back, to glean the harvest of the legacy they left India so many years ago: “a great international trading language and a sense of humour”.