A few days ago, comedian and Family Man writer Suman Kumar dropped a teaser for a new comedy show titled Buttercup. Knowing that Kumar had adopted an indie dog named Buttercup recently, we decided to dig deeper.
It turns out that the show actually is about Kumar’s adopted dog Buttercup. The show tells a story that all of us dog lovers have lived through at some point or another. The comic will talk about how, with the help of his daughter, he was able to convince his wife to let the family adopt a dog. Kumar will then share how Buttercup endears herself to the family over time and vice versa.
Although the dog is the focus of the show, Kumar will also take us back to his childhood days, his friends, family and neighbours, and the dogs he grew up with.
“I grew up in this town called Chittoor in Andhra and our neighbours who lived 5 houses down, had a daughter and a son, and the son went and picked up a puppy from a litter, an indie dog,” he tells us. “They realized the pup was a female after a few weeks and they took her, her name was Rosie, she is no more, some 20 km away from the town and left her and came back. The poor dog came back to their house and they didn’t let her inside. Other dogs in the area were very territorial and they started attacking Rosie. She saw my dad walking and she just followed him and came into our house and into our lives. I want to talk about how we impose our sexism and misogyny even while adopting pups.”
“And number two is how you go and get a Siberian Huskey to your Chennai home and call him Lokesh or whatever…,” he continues. On the subject of pet peeves, Kumar is astonished by dogs used as status symbols and brought out of their natural habitats to live in conditions unpleasant to them. The comedian clarifies “I don’t have any noble intentions behind it, it’s just going to be an hour of stories, but stories move people so if somebody goes and adopts an indie after this, well great.”
Asked about what he means by season 1, Kumar explained that he plans to write 3 hours of ‘Buttercup’, which he will divide into seasons. The comedian is even ready to experiment with formats while workshopping his material, considering that stories about dogs are so universal that even audience members could pitch in.
Kumar says that we can expect to see him workshop his material in smaller rooms in Bangalore by the end of the year. The comic intends to hit smaller venues in either Bangalore or Bombay before beginning touring other parts of the country including Hyderabad and Chennai, with Delhi and Calcutta on the radar as well. “I also want to go to tier two cities as well because I am a small-town guy. That can be done once I’ve got the material polished and it’s ready for wider consumption.”
On when we can expect any YouTube videos of the show, Kumar said, “I’m at a very early stage and right now I’m developing and workshopping the material on the side… I think it will be at least 10 months before I put any video out on this. It has nothing to do with any OTT or anything, it’s my pet project (ha-ha).”
comments
comments for this post are closed