The New Face Of Indian Comedy

At the age of 24, Bhuvan Bam is already one of the most important Indians on the internet. In September, he became the first Indian YouTuber to hit the 10 million subscriber mark, with his immensely popular comedy channel, BB Ki Vines; each video he puts out, in which he plays a variety of characters, gets between 20 to 30 million views. This year, he also starred in a popular short film, Plus Minus, and is gearing up to write and star in a BB Ki Vines feature film in 2019. Over the course of 2018, he’s managed to live a lifetime, and is at the forefront of the new pop culture movement in India.

- Arnesh Ghose

Even if you’re not a fan of his brand of comedy, Bhuvan Bam is not a man you can ignore. With 11 million subscribers to his YouTube comedy channel BB Ki Vines (he hit 10 million in September and is up by a million already), he’s in the unique position of being both a laughing matter - and not being one. It’s a clear sign that the content he is producing is extremely relatable and engaging, because the numbers don’t lie. To give you some kind of perspective, Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment has a subscriber base of 4.1 million on YouTube. Salman Khan Films has 1.4 million and Dharma Productions is at 3.6 million. The most popular comedy channels, like AIB (3.1m), Filter Copy (3.6m) and TVF (4.7m) are not even close to him. Even digital behemoths like Netflix have only 6.2 million subscribers, and Bam is also winning the numbers game when it comes to views per video, with an average of 20 to 25 million.

What do these figures tell us? For starters, Bam’s content is the story of the common Indian. It talks about everyday realities, and the various characters he plays can be found in every neighbourhood in India. His content is rich with the colour and vibrancy of small town and suburban India, where most of this country resides. It is important to understand that Indian metros are bubbles that are quite detached from the dynamics of the rest of India, and due to intra-metro movement, there is a sort of homogeneity that affects these cities.