Remember the cryptic message Shreeja Chaturvedi dropped earlier this year hinting at a taping for an OTT platform that “rhymes with rhyme”? Well, the cat’s out of the bag now. Amazon Prime Video has just dropped the trailer for new comedy special Stand Up Shorts which will feature Shreeja Chaturvedi, Aadar Malik, Shankar Chugani and Ramya Ramapriya. The four comedians will perform 15-minute sets in the hour-long special which premieres on the streaming platform on 26 August.

“Shooting this during COVID-19 was a little tricky,” Chugani told DeadAnt. “Everything had to be kept in check in terms of safety for the crew, the audience and the performers which was quite a challenge,” he said. As soon as the first lockdown was lifted and things started to open up the four comedians hit the road to perform their shows together and prepare their sets. The special was shot just before the second countrywide COVID-19 lockdown was announced in April.

Shankar Chugani—who previously appeared on the first season of Amazon’s Comicstaan—will touch upon workplace stories and his love for football during his set. “It’s 15 minutes of standup that I’ve been working on in the last couple of years,” he said. Chugani had been testing his material on his Zoom show titled Chaar Log Hasenge. “It’s a show where only four tickets were available online and that really helped me a lot. The lesser the number of people, the lesser the distractions and distance between the audience and the performer,” he said.

Aadar Malik, who was part of Prime Video’s LOL: Hassee Toh Phasse, told us that the edit was the most taxing part of the entire process. “We didn’t get to be there in person while editing so that was a very laborious process to exchange each edit over email,” he said. “Everything that you could have just said to an editor sitting next to him, you had to explain on an email and then try to make them understand why.”

Malik’s set will focus entirely on his relationship with his grandmother. “I’ve exclusively spoken about my grandmother and the different things I’ve experienced with her over time,” he said. “Her sense of humour. The kind of jokes that she used to crack. I’m literally just going through weird conversations I had with her. And it ends with a song that I’ve written about her.”

“I’ve been trying this material for a very long time,” he added. “This set was supposed to release over a year and a half ago and then COVID happened. So this particular set has been getting delayed for a while. It’s finally coming through and it’s very heartening. It’s that one thing that was stuck for such a long time and it’s finally seeing the light of day,” he concluded.