Modern love is the funniest joke. That's why comedy shows are so heavy on dating content
Picture this: one girl and three boys—all blindfolded on stage. She must pick one to date. That's how it goes on the comedy dating show Andha Pyar. Thanks to the comics as acting judges, the one-week Bumble cycle of swiping, texting, and unmatching is wrapped up in an hour. It's not the only show of its kind—and they all get views in millions.
Funny or not, almost all comedians in the world have performed at least one set on dating and relationships. Whether it is Anubhav Singh Bassi, Prashasti Singh, Urooj Ashfaq, Daniel Sloss, Taylor Tomlinson, or the open mic newbies at the neighbourhood cafe—everybody has their own punchlines. Now, some of them have even started finding matches for the public.
Zakir Khan has been the unofficial life coach for heartbroken men. He's joked about the melting hearts of 'sakht launde', one-sided yearning, and being rejected by women. Sometimes sounding like a border-line incel. But now he's changing gears. His fresh take on relationships? Iss hammam me sab nange hain (everyone is flawed). In his standup Smart Girl Dating Pattern, he says that 'intelligent' women have the worst taste—rejecting men like Elon Musk (his words, not ours) only to, in a moment of existential darkness, pick the nearest available loser. Is he onto something? No comments.
Pain sells
Why are comedy routines so heavy on dating content these days? Because there are few jokes funnier than the modern dating culture. The stand-up script writes itself. And, as the dating pool expands in the apps-based romance era, everybody's having the same experiences, more or less. It's so damn relatable. Even when comics don't have material prepared on the subject, they dabble in it through crowd work. 'Hey, you two in the front. Are you dating each other?' Bam. The joke bank is unlocked right there.
The way things are going, it won't be wrong to say that the dating scene is spicing up and ruining stand-up comedy at the same time. What's so original about ghosting, Hinge bios, break-up texts, and bizarre first dates? Comedian Kaustubh Agarwal comes on stage and starts whining about how he's having a hard time in bed. First of all, barf. Second, why is he laughing the hardest at his own joke? Prashasti Singh, on the other hand, talks about her date with a South Bombay guy. Her material is so painfully predictable, you could piece it together after watching two reels and a SoBo meme page.
Only a few comics are keeping their hands off this goldmine of comedy. A New York-based comedian, Abby Govindan, doesn't do it because she says her dating stories are not relatable. 'I only date men with bed frames and 401ks and a secure attachment style. No one would laugh.' And she's right. Look at Zakir Khan, his romantic failures made his career. Pain sells, and a comic rejected in love gets the loudest cheers.
Also read: Spotify is now a dating app. Its song libraries lead you into love
Not just haha, hehe
Believe it or not, comics are holding up a mirror. On a Valentine's Day show, a comedian asked women to raise their hands if they had paid for their tickets. The only girl who did was roasted along with her date. The whole arena was laughing at them. Kenny Sebastian, in his new set, talks about how his parents fell in love. He says that because of arranged marriages, ugly men like his father ended up with pretty wives. Where is the lie?
Tarang Hardikar is my new favourite comedian – just for the way he trashes the modern language of dating. He says he doesn't know how to be on dates, and by accumulating all the advice he's received about it, he's come up with a human temperature scale. Cold, cool, chill, warm, hot. Everybody must act chill to seem hot. And somewhere between cold and hot, sex gets involved. It's a complex code to crack.
The comedy material on dating isn't plain and simple haha, hehe. It's also about defining one's identity and challenging the cone of silence. Comicstaan graduate Swati Sachdeva did the unexpected by coming out as bisexual during her 2022 show Love is Love, and talking about her hairdresser girlfriend. She had the audience in stitches with her punchline—'You can imagine how good she's with scissors.' American comedian Hope Woodard started doing videos about her year-long break from sex and love, and it started a whole new movement on the internet—boysober. It touched so many nerves that The New York Times published an article about her.
I can't reveal my sources, but the state of romance is such that Cupid has shot himself in the foot. And he's watching comedy specials to cope. Honestly, same. There's also some profound wisdom to be found in there. Daniel Sloss, in his 2018 Netflix comedy special, introduced us to his dad's Jigsaw theory—life is like a puzzle with four fixed corners and no instructions. You start with family, friends, hobbies, and career. And then look for the elusive pieces. Love, force it too early, and the whole picture falls apart. Fine by me.
Moreover, if comedian Shubham Upadhyay didn't joke about his love life, how would I know what goes on in RSS schools? 'Raksha Bandhan was our Valentine's Day. If a girl ties a rakhi on you, it means she likes you,' said Upadhyay. When he asked his crush for a rakhi, she rejected him by saying, 'I see you as my brother.' Poor guy was Bhagwa-zoned.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
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