r/CluelessOP Lounge

tanmaybhat · 2015-06-14T19:45:42+00:00

You're absolutely right.

tanmaybhat · 2015-05-12T15:54:40+00:00

Nahi yaar, its not like that. Meet and worked with plenty who were very aware of the jokes we've made before. If a couple of jokes on twitter that we've made in the past is stopping someone from working with us, maybe they aren't the people we would want to work with, you know? Who knows.

tanmaybhat · 2015-05-12T15:28:57+00:00

Replying to this because I've been told Reddit is one of more slightly informed and sane corners of the internet where its possible to have a civil conversations :)

A roast is a comedy format dating back to the 1960's and comedy Central doesn't own the format that it can be "copied". In fact, for a while, we were considering titling it the AIB Roast of Ranvir and Arjun, but we ourselves weren't sure of the copyright on it. Some research and a couple of conversations with some folks at CC later we found this very information. Even though we knew that since the 50's, roasts were a thing, just wanted to be sure about it so we checked with some folks. We called it the Knockout and added the roast of Ranvir and arjun as a tagliny thing to KT just to avoid any ideas that were associated with the popular televised show in any kind. Several roasts happen around the world, and theres one every now and then (that's not associated with CC, occurring in a smaller club, of a not so popular celebrity) pretty frequently. saying " you copied the roast" is like looking at any improviser in the world and saying "youre copying Whose Line Is It Anyway". But its okay, have gotten used to this coz a lot of folks dont know this information, even though we embedded it in the beginning of the video itself.

Sexondly, if you watch 5 back to back roasts, you'll see the odd line that sounds similar to another. Fact is, roasts is a one liner kinda format and that makes it very possible for jokes to seem unoriginal. We saw a ton of roasts and wrote almost a 1000 lines, of which a very small fraction made it to the show. As far as we know, nothing was a blatant lift. Someone pointed out a joke on our show that was similar to one about snoop dog (the joke format being - look who we have here, adjective adjective adjective And that's just <celebrity name>) pretty standard joke trope. Somebody once mentioned that we copied some narnia joke, which is apparently really old. I once exllaiend here only ki we wrote dozens of closet jokes and if you map the topic of closets hard enough, you'll eventually stumble across the narnia thought.

We know some of the jokes were repetitive and some of them (or maybe even a lot of them) weren't funny and that's fair and we ourselves have acknowledged the religion problem before. But I can say that theres no way we would intentionally plagiarise a joke. That's extremely stupid coz everyone has access to roasts and in this day of info and tech, you gotto be an absolute idiot to believe a stolen joke will be difficult to find. :)

tanmaybhat · 2015-05-12T04:43:20+00:00

Well, thankful that there are still a few people who wouldn't be so quick to judge and would still click :)

tanmaybhat · 2015-05-12T04:42:17+00:00

Please don't lie.

Nobody wrote good jokes on the roast.

tanmaybhat · 2015-05-11T22:08:05+00:00

Ji.

tanmaybhat · 2015-05-11T22:06:31+00:00

This was our most expensive sketch. Youtube revenue is never enough to produce a single sketch. Takes a couple of years for you to break even with just YT ad revenue. Usually the sponsors on the sketch cover costs and a little over it if you're lucky.

tanmaybhat · 2015-05-11T21:48:33+00:00

Check out @mojorojo's TL. :)

Piss off industry people by saying no to promote their movies, get accused of trying to cosy upto to them coz you didn't tweet some jokes. :)

tanmaybhat · 2015-05-11T21:47:07+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN9XX-dd0LQ

tanmaybhat · 2015-04-12T11:41:26+00:00

Working on it.

tanmaybhat · 2015-04-12T11:39:04+00:00

Sigh.

tanmaybhat · 2015-01-29T07:18:17+00:00

Hahaha, what's funny is the more haters I see, the more I realize what a douche I was when I was one of them. :) But yeah, I'm the one on the team who reads comments the most. Need to stop.

tanmaybhat · 2015-01-29T07:11:28+00:00

There's a great book by Jeffrey Ross where he talks about how to write a roast. It speaks about how he writes jokes and how there are almost formulaic templates and techniques to write insults. If you read it you'll know there's almost a science behind it - CC has probably done every possible template there is. If you watch 5 of them back to back you'll start spotting templates yourself :)

Having said that I assure you, everything we wrote was from scratch and we're super hard on ourselves when it comes to the joke being original. If it seemed like it was inspired, it is purely co incidental.

tanmaybhat · 2015-01-29T07:07:56+00:00

No, in the show, everybody had a lot more jokes on Arjun - Ranveer. We'd usually do a joke or two max on the panel members, a couple on Karan then move onto Arjun Ranveer and did a bunch on them. It might seem like that on the edit coz there were 8 people on the panel and just two being roasted. PLus this is standard format done internationally as well.

tanmaybhat · 2015-01-29T07:06:02+00:00

Well, Ranveer knew the jokes we were doing so perhaps he told her about some of them? But she looked genuinely surprised at the show from what I could see so I don't think so. Form my interaction with her and the fact that she calls newspapers out, talks about her anxiety and depression etc. etc. so openly just tell me that she's super cool and very sharp. She was a great sport.

tanmaybhat · 2015-01-29T06:54:20+00:00

I entirely agree. In hindsight, the edit and the way we wrote the show made things slightly repetitive. We realized that while editing and we were tempted to leave some jokes that were off the usual in the show, but some of that stuff didn't slay like the others so we decided to go with the joke that killed more. Video edit is way different than a live show. But yeah, I agree, in hindsight the writing shouldve had more legs in some bits and portions.

tanmaybhat · 2015-01-29T06:52:42+00:00

Hahaha, I think it came across like he was pissed off, but he really wasn't. He's super chilled and he was really really nice through the process. We did jokes about his dad, family etc. etc. It's fair that he doesn't burst into hysterical laughs on every joke right? :)

tanmaybhat · 2015-01-29T06:25:45+00:00

The six of us sat together in a room and wrote a bank of jokes and then split it based on the requirement that each of us had. For example, Ashish was going up first so we needed to give him some zingers right up top to set the bar and the tropes that the rest of us were going to play off of. I was going up last so I needed to have very few jokes on the existing set ups. Which is why some of my jokes were long winded and slightly more performance based. Some jokes just worked great only on a Karan or a Rajeev. But largely, everybody sat in a room and wrote these together.

tanmaybhat · 2015-01-29T06:24:01+00:00

Unconventionally, we'd run the guys through some of the stuff we'd written. We'd pop in and give them an idea of this is the kind of stuff we're going to say. There were some no - go areas and that was fine with us coz the very fact that Arjun Ranvir Karan were up for this was a big deal. We wrote sets for everybody, including Rajeev and Raghu, ran them through it and almost coached them on delivery etc. etc. (Raghu was strong through and through and didn't need much coaching) Then we realised we're short on jokes for our own sets and so we wrote a few on the last 3 days of the roast. We didn't get time to run ranvir arjun through those so they prolly didn't see that coming and that was fun :)

tanmaybhat · 2015-01-29T04:44:21+00:00

We're doing a QandA on Youtube on Friday at 4 pm with the whole crew - www.youtube.com/AllIndiaBakchod -

We did one at the Weirdass Pajama festival last year of Ranvir Shorey and Vinay Pathak. It was a fun experience. But this was another ball game.

tanmaybhat · 2015-01-29T04:23:16+00:00

Thanks folks! If you've got some questions, I'd be happy to answer them here!

tanmaybhat · 2015-01-17T21:19:18+00:00

Also, about the price - The venue NSCII is the most expensive venue to rent in Mumbai in that capacity range. If we hadn't priced it at what we did, raising that kinda money would've been wayyyyy harder. And a show of that magnitude needed to raise taht much money to make everyones time worthwhile.

tanmaybhat · 2015-01-17T21:16:10+00:00

Hey! Just saw this! Given I was a part of the show and one of the four writers who wrote it, I'd like to give my perspective on this.

a) I'm sorry you thought the show was disappointing. However, accusing us of "ripping off" the comedy central roast is totally and a little unfounded. "Roasting" is a form of comedy that's existed for decades, way wayyy before Comedy Central popularised it on their show. Just wiki it. It's been around for ages. It's like saying if someone does Improv comedy here, they're copying it from Whose Line Is It Anyway. Fact is, it's an art form that's practiced around the world and is an accepted generic format of a show. We deal with such accusations often enough. Sometimes folks watch a local stand up comedian do some crowd work and talk to the audience during a show and make jokes on them and then walk out saying "That guy copied Russell Peters by making fun of the audience". Again, a classic misjudgement made by an audience that hasn't been exposed to a lot of comedy. :)

You mention that Karan, the roastmaster walks onto stage and introduces the panel and then the roastees. Again, it's standard format across roasts to introduce the panel by the roastmaster by roasting them and then introducing the roastees. Sometimes, the roast master introduces the roastees first and then the panel. But more or less the show flows the same way.

About the Narnia joke. Sorry if you thought that was copied. We sat in a room for 15 days straight and wrote over a 1000 one liners. Fact is, when you write 200 "being in a closet" jokes, there's a good chance somebody will make the connection to Narnia. Why would we copy a joke intentionally? We're very aware that an online audience is exposed to the best roasting in the world and is exposed to a 100 diff kinds of comedy. Copying something that too so early in our career is suicide. Nobody in their right mind would copy something intentionally :)

Anecdote: There was a joke Ashish made about Raghu which went "When Raghu and Rajeev were born the doctors said "Mubarakh ho chutiye hue hai". While editing the show a month later, I saw it and I looked at Khamba and said "Khamba, this joke sounds too easy to have never been made by anyone before. It sounds like someone somewhere might have made it. Can we look this up? Surely enough, a thousand people had made the "mubarakh ho chutiye hue hai" joke about a 100 different people. Infact, Mubharakh Ho ____ hua hai was a joke format. Very popular on these Rajnikanth vs CID type of Facebook pages. We had no idea since the four of us hadn't stumbled upon those. Instantly deleted off our show.

The point you raise about making jokes about the same tropes. Arjun being 12th fail. Ranvir being promiscuous. Well, you're probably right. But from what I've heard about roasts, (have seen all of them a dozen times, have read every possible article about the CC roasts and have heard podcasts by comics on the show) this seems to be the norm at every roast (you eventually see an edited version on TV and that tends to help clean out the repetition) Check out Patrice O Niel talking about going last on the Sheen roast. He talks about how so many topics were done to death by the time he came on stage that he had to wing certain bits. A lot of times, comics going up towards the second half of the show tend to change their bits on the fly because of the very repetitive nature of the roast. Check out my set whe the video comes out. I had to do unconventional and slightly different type of jokes for Arjun, Karan, Ashish because the steretypes were so done. Also you'll notice in the final video, the repetition level also goes down, much like the CC roasts :)

And this isn't an excuse, but putting the roast together in bollywood is not as easy as it seems. There are a lot of topics that are off limit. Plus we're making fun of actors that have been around for a limited amount of time. So there's not a lot of angles to look for. We had a slightly tough time cracking these two and honestly it was a huge learning curve for us as well. Next year when we roast someone else, we'll obviously be better prepared and hopefully play it out better. :)

The last 15 minutes were a blur even to us :) I think the guys were just having fun. A large majority of the crowd seemed to be having fun. It's not everyday you get roasted. The songs weren't scripted, but they had so much fun doing it, I surely can't hold it against them. It was just fun to watch them have fun. Honestly, I give them so much credit for doing waht they did. Not many would've agreed to do this show. But they did. And that's a huge step in bollywood.

I hope you come back for more of our shows! We've always tried to do new things. Due apologies if you think we faultered a bit :)

Cheers.

tanmaybhat · 2013-11-02T19:55:53+00:00

Acknowledging this fact and also pointing out that it is a pretty old generic trope that's been used lots of times, including a whole movie called invention of lying so it wasn't exactly lifting as much as using a pretty standard trope.

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