A flawed but promising night of laughter at Naveed's Comedy Club

Being an avid fan of standup comedy, it always disappointed me that Bangladesh did not have a standup comedy culture. Yesterday's nearly full-house comedy show, on a bone-chilling winter night at Naveed's Comedy Club (NCC), filled me with the joy and hope that my presupposition had been proven wrong and would only be proven further in the coming years. 

Although Naveed's Comedy Club had been around for many years, since Naveed Mahbub's debut as a comedian a decade ago, they moved to their current location at Road-90, Gulshan-02 in November 2021. Since then, they have held regular comedy shows and seem to have been able to foster a following among Dhakaites. 

Yesterday's show was unassumingly titled the "First Comedy Show of 2023". The show was supposed to begin at 7:30 PM, but given the 12-degree chilly weather and the Thursday traffic to beat, the organisers had to wait for the guests to arrive. Eventually, the show began at around 8:10 PM. 

Naveed broke the ice with some crowd work; to be honest, with some cliched and forgettable jokes. The crowd seemed to love it nonetheless and more importantly, these would, in no way, represent the rest of the night.

The first one to perform was Forhad Sohel, a relative newcomer to the comedy scene in Bangladesh. Although he could not land the punchlines for some of his jokes, the effort was appreciated. On the bright side, his last joke about a house tutor really had the crowd going and showed promise. 

That being said, the show really came to life with the next two performances and Naveed's introductory monologues in between them. 

Naveed's experiences at a highly male-dominated engineering school, with a hint of casual relatable innuendos, made the room burst into laughter. However, he reached his peak at the end, before introducing the headliner with his hilarious take on the nomenclature of different regions in South America, especially given their history of Spanish colonialism. I will not spoil the joke. You really have to be there to enjoy it.

Jahid Hridoy was a breath of fresh air in a room dominated by urbanites, most of whom, in my observation, likely came from an affluent background. Hridoy neither had the suaveness of a highly educated urbanite, nor the accent of a practised pretender. He owned up to who he was: a by-product of the "Noakhailla Medium". Despite a few bad jokes, the audience struggled to keep a hold of themselves during Hridoy's gig. He knew when to pause and how to let a joke breathe. He let the audience savour the taste of each joke and then he went on to the next one to repeat the same. 

But what epitomised Hridoy's performance was his spontaneous expressions and the relatability of his performances. Hridoy's subversion of expectations with his new year resolutions and his keen commentary on Bangladesh's celebrity culture and advertisement industry were amusing.

But the star of the show, albeit by a small margin, was Madhadi Hasan Toru — the headliner. Brought up in a middle-class family in Mohammadpur, unsurprisingly, Toru's jokes would be a constant play on the very relatable experience of a middle-class Bangladeshi. Toru's best attribute was his impressions of the different characters in his story. His impression of his Bihari friend was uncanny and the mental image of two teenagers smoking in graves to hide from their acquaintances had me rolling on the floor. 

To different people, standup comedy means a lot of different things. To some, it's a way out from the hectic city life. To others, it's a way to speak truth to power, to punch up and to hold the powerful accountable, with the last resort: laughter. Naveed's Comedy Club probably does not achieve the latter. But it sure can be the stepping stone towards achieving that goal in the coming years as more stand-up comics find the courage to share what's going on in their brilliant minds.