A year ago, Aakash Mehta and Waquar Rehman were standing in a much emptier version of the green room at the Backspace comedy club in Lower Parel trying to explain to us why opening three comedy clubs at once wasn’t completely insane. They’d already been running a room in Thane since 2017, but now wanted to bet on Pune, Ahmedabad and Mumbai. Mehta had an especially ambitious way of describing where he wanted to take it: Backspace would become the “Starbucks of comedy in India”.

Twelve months later, things have moved faster than expected. Backspace now has five venues and they’re adding more. Before Diwali, Pune will have two comedy clubs, and Hyderabad and Bhopal will also get their own Backspace clubs taking their tally up to eight. The company has also started building out two other parts of the business: Backspace Plus, a live production team; and Backspace Mini, a network of spaces that aren’t necessarily full-time comedy clubs but can still host shows to Backspace’s standards and expand outside of India. 

Backspace Mini Singapore is the first example of what the latter can look like. It isn’t a full-time Backspace room, but the company has partnered with an existing space in Singapore to bring Indian programming there. “These spaces aren’t operating as comedy clubs 24×7; we just use them intermittently to host comedy nights, and spruce up the tech needed to industry standard,” co-founder (and comedian) Mehta explains. 

That approach has naturally led to the creation of Backspace Plus. Running comedy clubs across multiple cities has given the team a crash course in what a comedy show actually needs behind the scenes, and those lessons are now being applied to larger productions.

“The clubs have become a proper training machine for people to learn how to do comedy production,” says Mehta. “It’s not just playing walk-in music > entry song > exit song. It’s about curating the whole experience.”

That focus also extends to the artist experience. One of the things the founders believe Backspace has got right is designing the venues from the artist’s perspective. They go the extra mile rather than simply treating the room as a space to put a stage and chairs. “We are slightly anal about the experience for the artist,” Rehman asserts. “That has always been the thing.”

They point to the green rooms and spaces to hang out before a show, particularly in Pune, where many performers travel to from Mumbai or Delhi. The physical rooms have also required plenty of trial and error: Pune’s 180-seater, for instance, meant figuring out its unusual layout, sound and lighting while retaining the intimacy that makes the space work for comedy. 

Not every lesson from running five venues has been quite so profound though. What did they underestimate about the cost of running multiple clubs?

“Paper cups,” shoots Rehman, not missing a beat. 

“Fucking hate that,” comes Mehta’s immediate response. “Fucking paper cups. Endless pursuit.”

They joke about buying thousands at a time only to run out again. Posters, too, have become an unexpectedly annoying expense. “Every time I look at that balance sheet, I am annoyed at how much we spend on posters.”

But if the last year has been about building the physical infrastructure for comedy, the next challenge is figuring out what happens inside those rooms once they’re built. One thing the founders have noticed is that audiences are still often following the comedian rather than the comedy itself.

“There is a lot of audience for faces,” they admit.

For Backspace, the longer-term ambition is to change that relationship—to make the club itself a recommendation audiences trust, rather than simply a venue they visit when someone they know is performing. “I want to be at a place where people trust me with the space, they trust me with the recommendation and when I tell them to come and watch a comedian, they do it,” says Mehta. “That’s really the dream.”

It’s the same kind of trust Backspace needs to build with newer comedians. Backspace has open mics and tries to give newer comics opportunities, but there is inevitably a balancing act between giving someone stage time and putting together a lineup that works for a paying audience. “Comedy is all about trust,” they say.

The company is expanding into new cities, production and different kinds of spaces, but the underlying idea remains the same: create places where comedians can thrive, comedy can actually function as an ecosystem and audiences see it as something more than something that happens on stage for an hour.

For Mehta, that relationship with the stage has become particularly personal over the past year. He stepped away from standup while focusing on building Backspace, but returned earlier this year with his new hour Relapse. Mystery Monday, his open mic that usually happens at their Lower Parel venue, gave him a place to experiment with the new material. “It was, like, my open mic to try shit as much as I wanted,” he says. “So I could get Relapse ready in, like, the three months that I needed for it to be ready.”

That probably gets to the heart of what Backspace has been trying to build over the past year. The company is expanding into new cities, production and different kinds of spaces, but the underlying idea remains the same: create places where comedians can thrive, comedy can actually function as an ecosystem and audiences see it as something more than something that happens on stage for an hour.

A year in, Backspace is no longer just testing whether there is room for more comedy clubs. It’s trying to figure out what happens when you build enough of them for a scene to start treating them as its own. “Clubs are useless unless the scene embraces them,” they say.

That scene, at least for now, seems to be making itself comfortable in their space. And Backspace is already busy making more room for it.