Stand-up comedians from India
340 comedians
Indian stand-up runs on more than one language at once. A set can move between Hindi and English inside a single joke, a habit audiences here call Hinglish, and the comics on this page also work in Tamil, Urdu, Punjabi and Gujarati. Zakir Khan built his storytelling on small-town Hindi and Urdu, Kunal Kamra writes political satire in English and Hindi, and Aakash Gupta leans on physical comedy and character voices. The language a comic chooses decides which part of the country hears the punchline.
The route to an audience runs through the internet more than through broadcast. YouTube did not amplify an existing circuit in India, it created one, and that shows in who is listed here: Bhuvan Bam, Samay Raina and Niharika Nm reached stand-up through video channels, while Tanmay Bhat went the other way, from sketch and stand-up into reaction videos and gaming commentary. Mainstream television and Bollywood comedy did not disappear when that happened; both still sit alongside club material.
Clubs came first, though. The circuit was built on open mics in cafes and a handful of dedicated rooms in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi, and a streaming competition, Comicstaan, later turned it into a pipeline for new names. Political satire carries legal exposure that is worth knowing about: Kunal Kamra was named in a police complaint over a joke about a serving state politician, and the Mumbai studio where he had recorded the set was vandalised.
🇮🇳Bhuvan Bam
🇮🇳Tanmay Bhat
stand-up · sketch
Palaniappan Manickam
🇮🇳Bharti Singh
🇮🇳Samay Raina
dark humor · observational
🇮🇳Zakir Khan
observational · storytelling
Niharika Nm
🇮🇳Sudesh Lehri
🇮🇳Aashish Solanki
observational · storytelling
Gurleen Pannu
🇮🇳Kunal Kamra
political satire · current affairs
🇮🇳Aakash Gupta
physical comedy · observational
Raunaq Rajani
🇮🇳Gaurav Kapoor
observational · anecdotal
🇮🇳Abhishek Upmanyu
observational · dry humor
🇮🇳Munawar Faruqui
storytelling · autobiographical
🇮🇳Anubhav Singh Bassi
Bassi
storytelling · observational
Ramesh Pisharody
Harsh Gujral
🇮🇳Aranthangi Nisha
🇮🇳Kenny Sebastian
musical comedy · observational
Abishek Kumar
🇮🇳Mir Afsar Ali
Jaspreet Singh
Shashi Dhiman
🇮🇳Gaurav Gupta
Observational · Anecdotal
Madurai Muthu
Shreya Priyam Roy
Vivek Samtani
🇮🇳Amit Tandon
Observational comedy · Family humor
🇮🇳Rahul Dua
observational · dark humour
🇮🇳Rajat Chauhan
Observational · Anecdotal
Inder Sahani
🇮🇳Sundeep Sharma
Observational · Anecdotal
🇮🇳Pranit More
Shyam Rangeela
Priyanshu Bharadwaj
Nesan David
🇮🇳Ravi Gupta
Shudh Desi Comic
Anecdotal · Storytelling
🇮🇳Pugazh
🇮🇳Vidyullekha Raman
🇮🇳Vipul Goyal
🇮🇳Sanket Bhosale
🇮🇳Varun Grover
Ramkumar
Rajasekhar Mamidanna
Anish Goregaonkar
Appurv Gupta
🇮🇳Vir Das
political satire · observational
🇮🇳Aditya Mehta
Stand-up · Observational comedy
Sushant Ghadge
🇮🇳Varun Thakur
character comedy · observational
🇮🇳Aakash Mehta
KuchBhiMehta
Observational · Anecdotal
Sindhu Vee
🇮🇳Kapil Sharma
sketch comedy · celebrity interview
Urooj Ashfaq
🇮🇳Biswa Kalyan Rath
Biswa
intellectual · pop culture
🇮🇳Gursimran Khamba
🇮🇳Pratyush Chaubey
Chaubeyji
Stand-up · Anecdotal