In the corporate world, employees have a tendency to gather informally around a water cooler in order to socialise and share gossip. This is known as the Water Cooler Effect. Every industry has an equivalent of this. In music, it’s the jam rooms and recording studios. In the world of cinema and TV shows, it’s the writers’ rooms and production studios. Similarly, in the world of standup comedy, certain comedy clubs serve as a hub for comics to come together and riff, discuss bits and exchange information about what’s happening in the scene.
In Bengaluru, that spot is the Underground Comedy Club (UGC), an intimate underground venue in the heart of Koramangala. Since the club launched on 4 November 2023, it’s played host to comedians from all over the country, ranging from stars like Kanan Gill, Urooj Ashfaq and international comedian Aakash Singh, to the most promising local voices. Walk in and there’s a chance you’ll spot them all at UGC, performing solo sets, testing out fresh material or just hanging out with their peers.
Comedians Harman Preet Singh and Kartikeya Fatwani founded the club alongside Anjay Madhan. They were majorly motivated by the lack of dedicated comedy venues in the city. “Bengaluru is easily one of the best markets for standup comedy in India, where comedians sell three times the number of tickets compared to the rest of the country,” says Singh. “But when my relatives would ask me where I perform most often, I didn’t have a specific place that I could send them to where they could enjoy quality standup. Like, in Mumbai you can go to KCC [Khar Comedy Club] or The Habitat. There was no dedicated space for that in the city.”
So when Fatwani reached out to Singh with a proposal to start a club last April, he was all in. Singh had already been successfully running the Yuck! Comedy Club—a small 25-seater club at Flax in Bengaluru—alongside comedians Neelaksh Mathur, Gaurav Purohit, Hari Krishna and Vijeth VS. Now, he wanted to level up to a larger space that could give travelling comedians a bang for their buck, and offer the Bengaluru audience a more holistic experience. “It’s not easy for younger, up-and-coming comedians to travel for spots because they have to take care of their own expenses most times,” said Singh. “The maths of the ticket sales versus the cost they bear has to make sense for them.”
But setting up a comedy club comes with its fare share of hurdles. When Fatwani found a space in September, Harman realised that it was going to take a lot of work to establish a comedy club there. “It wasn’t in the best of conditions,” he told us. “It looked very dodgy, very unhabitable to be honest. It was filled with water and dead rats since it’s an underground venue. But when I thought about it in terms of performance—acoustics for comedy, seating, laugh reflection—it seemed like a decent place.”
So, they took on the challenge of revamping the space and launched the 100-seater club. The venue was far from done—a decent sound system needed to be hooked up, the green room needed to be expanded for lineup events—but they began operations anyway, with solo sets by comedians Punit Pania and Gautham Govindan. “We are still solving the artist experience in terms of the green room and such,” Singh told us. “But from the audience perspective we’re kinda there. They have the best experience with great acts in an intimate setting. And the comedians have been extremely receptive as well with Kanan [Gill], Kunal [Kamra], Anirban Dasgupta and Daniel Fernandes giving us dates. They’ve also been very helpful in giving us advice as to what we can change.”
In addition to serving as Bengaluru’s go-to comedy club, UGC also ensures that up-and-coming comedians and open micers get stage time. “There were zero late-night shows happening in the city,” says Singh. “So we decided to change that with a property called Late Night Sexy Jokes. Even with no known faces on the poster, we manage to pack the club, which is great for the local comedians who get access to a room that has anywhere between 40 to 90 people in the audience. This helps them gauge how tight their material is and workshop more efficiently.”
Comedian Gautham Govindan agrees that the late-night shows—a regular fixture in Mumbai and Delhi—were much-needed in the Bengaluru comedy scene. “It’s a great mic to do for the comics and a fun evening for the audience,” he said. “If you look at the scene overseas, comedy is a late-night activity where shows sometimes even begin at 1 am. That’s a gap that UGC is filling very easily.”
A key UGC innovation is that they’ve given curation responsibilities to different comedians for each day of the week. As touring artists who perform regularly across the country, they know who’s putting in the hard work. Currently, Anamika Haridas, Aamer Peeran, Gokul Kumar, Gaurav Purohit and Piyush Kumar curate the lineups for open mics from Monday to Friday, with Singh in charge of the late-night shows. “The idea is that the club should be run by the scene,” says Singh.
This approach is helping UGC build a closely-knit community of standup performers and consumers. The local comedians pull their weight to make sure that the club runs smoothly, and the crowd is there to back them up as well. “Regardless of who’s performing, people are coming to the venue which means what we’re doing is working,” Singh told us. “We have a repeat rate of approximately 40% for the late-night shows. They’ve stopped buying tickets online too. They just come to the venue and pay at the gate.”
There’ll be a lot more content coming out from Bengaluru-based comedians which was not the case so far.
In addition to comedians and the local audience, comedy professionals including sound engineers, directors and producers have rallied behind UGC to make sure they can amp up the club experience. “Karan Asnani—who has directed a lot of specials—came to the club and gave us pointers for recording videos,” says Singh. “Sreejith Menon, who is the sound engineer for most comedy videos and specials, told us how to ace the sound. Balraj Ghai from the Habitat spoke to me about how to market the club. So everyone’s been really wholesome and supportive overall.”
Thanks to UGC’s recording setup, comedians from Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru no longer need to travel all the way to Mumbai to shoot bits for YouTube. “Even my first video was shot at The Habitat,” says Gautham. “But now my first choice is UGC because that means I don’t have to travel and self-produce the shows.”
This also eliminates the pressure of marketing themselves in a completely different city. As a result, there’s a lot more video content coming out of the Bengaluru scene. “In today’s age, you have to constantly churn out material—be it a short reel or a YouTube video—and UGC is helping us do that,” Gautham adds.
In less than six months, Singh, Fatwani and the local comics have managed to turn UGC into a one-stop comedy shop, where comedians can go from workshopping new material to recording it for online release. It also helps that they can just pop in and riff with their peers on any given day. “On most weekends you’ll see 15 to 20 comedians just hanging out at the chai sutta place outside the venue,” says Singh. UGC is fully channelling the Water Cooler Effect.
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