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Home > Lifestyle News > Culture News > Article > Two improv comedians take you back to the 90s with their act

Two improv comedians take you back to the 90s with their act

Updated on: 03 June,2017 12:02 PM IST  |  Mumbai
Krutika Behrawala |

Two improv comedians invite you to throw nostalgic and bizarre elements from the decade at them, which they promise to turn into a hilarious act

Two improv comedians take you back to the 90s with their act

Ankit Challa and Avinash Verma will use props like scarves, jackets, hats and fake moustaches to essay various characters. Pic/Shadab Khan
Ankit Challa and Avinash Verma will use props like scarves, jackets, hats and fake moustaches to essay various characters. Pic/Shadab Khan


"Tell us one thing you miss about the '90s," comedians Ankit Challa and Avinash Verma ask us when we meet them at The Cuckoo Club in Bandra. We blurt out the first thing that comes to our mind - Shaktimaan. Instantly, they modulate their voices to sound like 10-year-olds, who head to a nearby well haunted by Shakaal. While Challa mimics his thunderous baritone and kidnaps the kids, Verma deepens the bass in his voice to enact Shaktimaan, replete with sound effects that denote he has landed on the scene out of thin air.


Then, he berates Shakaal in chaste Hindi, gets into a fight and goes on to save the day. The hilarious two-minute sketch, a major throwback to the decade of the red-and-gold attired Indian superhero, ends with the duo singing the show's title track.


Tomorrow, Challa and Verma will regale the audience with several such sketches at a 60-minute show titled, The Ankit And Avinash Show - Back To The '90s. The improvisational act has been designed on the lines of the cult American TV series, Whose Line Is It Anyway? where a panel of four performers create characters, songs and scenes based on audience prompt. "We zeroed in on the '90s because we grew up in that decade. It has a lot of material because so many changes happened at the time - from the arrival of satellite TV to cartoons, Yahoo Chatrooms and Sachin Tendulkar's sixes at the Sharjah World Cup," recalls 31-year-old Verma, a mechanical engineer, who met Challa at an improvisational comedy workshop conducted in the city by popular Seattle-based comedian, Adam Dow back in 2010. Challa, 32, a commerce graduate has trained as an actor at Barry John's acting studio.

Along with a few other participants of the workshop, the duo ended up forming Improv Comedy Mumbai, a group that has performed at festivals in Seattle, Amsterdam and Washington. "We share a great chemistry on stage, so, we decided to try out a two-man improv act last year. It is tougher because between the two of us, sometimes, we have to play 10 characters. Since there's no script, we need to be spontaneous and create an entire sketch from anything that might come our way - from a sound suggestion to a word like tape recorder or a scene from DDLJ," says Challa.

The duo will use a number of props - from scarves that help them mimic women to white shirts that make them look like doctors and fake moustaches - to make the characters look as real as possible. They've also roped in a friend to play background tracks, from Rap to Qawaali, depending on the scenes they recreate.

What if a member suggests a tragedy, like the 1993 Bombay blasts or The Kargil War? "We won't make fun of them but create dramatic sketches with an undertone of dark humour," sums up Verma.

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