There’s a certain magic to bantering with the gang. It’s the perfect balance of ribbing and roasting and in that moment, everything feels fine. Raunaq Rajani has managed to precisely capture these moments and create the DACA-winning YouTube show Relationsh!t Advice. The premise is simple—Rajani is joined by some comedian friends and they dish out relationship advice to people who have written in. Spoiler alert: it’s not very helpful. But it makes for a great watch.

After five years and 50 episodes, Rajani has really levelled up. Tickets for the tapings get sold out within hours (sometimes minutes). Bollywood celebrities are coming on to promote their upcoming releases. But Rajani has one thing clear in his head—it’s always going to be about the banter. “That’s what the people like and I will never change that aspect of the show,” he tells us.

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We caught up with the comedian to talk about his inspiration for the show, what he’s learnt along the way and who his dream celebrity guest is. Here’s a hint: if he comes to the show he’ll bring his paudha along.

What was the idea behind putting together a panel show?

So, growing up I was the kid who was always getting in trouble for talking in class. I just love talking about nonsense with everyone. That’s exactly what we do in the green room too. It’s just so much fun. At the end of the day, we’re all comedians. So we’re constantly trying to make each other laugh. It’s honestly funnier in the green room sometimes than the actual show. We’ll quickly run out, do our time and come back just to be part of the banter.

And then I realised it’s funny when you’re hanging out with your five friends but it’s generally funnier when those five friends are professional comedians. Everyone is a performer. So I really wanted to put that energy up on stage. That was the main idea behind doing a panel show.

What made you zero in on relationship advice?

The obvious thing was to talk about current events but I didn’t want to do that. I just wanted to talk shit, dude. It’s like gossiping. It’s always fun.

But just talking about people and putting it up on YouTube was not a possibility. So the closest thing we could do to that was an Agony Aunt-type thing where we don’t really come up with a solution. We just had to talk and see where the conversation goes. Relationships is an easy topic to riff on like that.

How do you curate the panel for the show?

The main thing is I want to highlight as many perspectives as possible. For that, I try and get people on a lineup who don’t have a lot in common. They come from different walks of life. For example, in the first season, I was engaged to my girlfriend of six years, Punya [Arora] was single and had been told she’ll get married soon by a pandit. Deep [Chhabria] had just started dating because he slid into someones DMs on LinkedIn. Angad had just had a baby girl. This just allowed for us to look at every question from so many different angles. It just makes the conversation so easy.

I think it gets boring when everyone is from the same school of thought. There are a bunch of podcasts where people have the same POV. And that gets boring after a point. So my main thought while curating a panel is to have diversity in the experiences they’ve had which in turn leads to differences in opinion. Nobody is right or wrong.

How long did you take to work out the kinks and get what you wanted out of the show?

We actually did a couple of shows even before Comicstaan. But I didn’t really get what I wanted. Finally I got the perfect balance of everything when I recorded an episode with Neville Shah, Urooj Ashfaq and Kunal Rao. It was exactly what I had visualised. And it really helped that all these people were genuinely good friends of mine. So there was a certain level of comfort in the banter which came across on stage.

Honestly, I had shot these episodes but I didn’t really think of releasing them until a specific incident that I look at with gratitude in hindsight. Basically, after Comicstaan I had some new-found fame. I was touring a lot. And right after the show I had a special sanctioned with a streaming platform. So because of this, I didn’t record anything for YouTube from my new hour to capitalist on my popularity post Comicstaan. But then the pandemic hit and companies started cutting budgets. In those cuts, my special got cancelled.

So with the pandemic in full swing and all the clubs shut, I was just sitting on an entire hour of material that I could have released during this time. I didn’t know what to do. So I looked into my hard drive and I found this recording of five of us talking about relationships. I put it out and people actually had nothing to do at the time. People watched it and it really clicked.

In the five years you’ve been doing this show, what are some things you’ve learnt?

I’ve actually learnt a lot about editing, production and post-production. During the first few episodes, I had zero understanding of any of these things. I didn’t even know what camera we were using, how the room was being miced, anything. But now we live in this age where if you’re on YouTube you have to know everything. Over the years I learnt all these things.

I’ve also learnt how to let go of jokes. I used to be very married to bits earlier. I used to get upset when I had to cut out a great joke because it wasn’t fitting into the flow of the episode. Or it’s going to be taken out of context. I used to be like we’re betraying the art. But now I understand the importance of letting go. I’m more present at the live tapings. Some things are best enjoyed in the moment and what I put out on YouTube is the best that I can give from that experience.

It has also helped me grow as a person. I used to look back at the recordings and be critical of the way I’m sitting or moving my legs. But over the years, I have come to the realisation that I’m just hanging out with friends. I don’t need to look at it so intensely.

Do the episodes go through an extensive edit process?

My one aim as an artist is to keep things as authentic as possible. I try to do that with my standup as well. It’s like this is who we truly are and this is how the conversation went. We don’t want to put up some image of ourselves. If you notice, there are times when I’ll start a story but I won’t finish it because someone cut me. But that’s how hangouts are in real life.

So I edit it in a very basic manner. And I feel like it works in my favour because it feels more reel. And that’s what the audience wants nowadays. They don’t want fancy sets and scripts. They just want to see someone be themselves.

What’s the most memorable fan interaction you’ve had?

So, I used to just look at it in this way that—look at me, I’m saying such bakwaas and getting a rise out of it. But I had a really heartening experience while I was touring. This one girl came up to me and told me, “I’m in the clear now but for the larger chunk of this year I was battling with cancer. And when I was so depressed all I did was binge watch your episodes.” That really hit me. Because some days I’m like I’m too lazy to edit today so no episode for you. But there are people out there in these situations who are looking forward to this release for some kind of respite. So now I’m at that point where I push myself to just do my fucking job and put out the episodes on time. But yeah, these messages are so surreal.

There was also this one Australian woman who messaged me saying she saw episodes of Relationsh!t throughout her pregnancy. And now they’ve named their son Raunaq. That was honestly the best thing I had heard in my life.

Do you know of any couples who started dating because they met through the show?

I actually do. There was this one guy who came in one of the Zoom episodes and mentioned that he was living abroad and feeling lonely. This was the episode with [Gursimran] Khamba. So we did make some jokes but then we gave some real advice. Because when there’s a real person there, you can’t just be an ass. We told him to stick it out, stay in touch with your family. His name was there on the call so I guess it helped people reach out to him. Out of those people, there was this one girl living in Singapore who wrote to him saying she related to his situation.

She was there at the recording of the episode with Vaibhav [Sethia], Shreeja [Chaturvedi] and Abish [Mathew]. She put her hand up and told us how she found her boyfriend-ish friend through the show. They bonded over how they were lonely in different countries away from home and became each others emotional support. They even met and really liked each other.

You’ve also got a few celebrities on the show lately. How has that been? Were skeptical at first because you might have to tone things down around them?

So the first celebrity who came on was Vidya Balan. They wanted to promote her film Do Aur Do Pyaar and someone from the production house, who had been to a bunch of tapings was a fan. Someone from her team was also a fan. Vidya saw some episodes and was on board. She also gave me some great feedback where she mentioned how regardless of how messed up someone’s message might be we never shit on them. I really felt like she took out the time to properly watch some episodes so that was refreshing. Even with Imran [Khan] it was a very chill episode.

One thing I made very clear with the production house early on though was that I’m not going to tone things down because there’s a celebrity on board. Because my fans would easily call that out in the comments if I did that. But luckily they were all very chill. And the fact that we got to meet in the green room and establish some kind of rapport before going up on stage was good.

But overall, I just wanted to make sure that I’m the same around my friends and these film stars. At the end of the day, like I said, it’s all about the banter. I didn’t want it to become some interview format. So if someone of a higher “stature” is a part of our show, they’ll be treated as a part of the gang only. We won’t be like, “Oh might sir, thank you for sitting with us.” I also got lucky with the fact that they were all so approachable and friendly.

Who is your dream celebrity guest?

It is Jackie Shroff. I keep telling people I want him on the show. I want Sanjay Dutt. These are talkative people. If you’ve seen clips of them together, they seem like such chill dudes. They seem to have so many fun stories. And they also don’t care about sharing these stories and ruining their image or whatever.