Comedy is a difficult genre to crack - Alok Jain on Laughter Chefs’ recipe for success

Comedy is a sure fire recipe for success for any medium, however, there have not been too many comedy content on any medium in recent times. The most one can remember is Kapil Sharma’s show.

Viacom18’s Hindi GEC Colors has ventured into comedy after quite some time with its show, ‘Laughter Chefs’, which premiered on June 1, 2024. The show brings together popular celebrities in an unusual cooking set up creating situational comedy. Comedienne Bharti Singh is hosting this spectacle, with celebrity chef Coach Harpal Singh Sokhi lending his expertise through the kitchen chaos and rating each dish prepared by the laughter chefs as they stumble through their culinary-comedy journey.

In conversation with Adgully, Alok Jain, President - General Entertainment, Viacom18, speaks at length about ‘Laughter Chefs’ and its journey since its inception, the viewership garnered, the evolution of comedy as a genre in India, and more. Jain, who has completed little over a year with Viacom18, also speaks about his journey, the Hindi media industry versus regional media, content consumption trends, and much more.

You have completed little over a year with Viacom18. How has your experience been and what has been your vision in driving the channels forward?

The difference between what I had been doing in the last few years and my work at Viacom18 is that I hadn’t worked in the Hindi media industry before. While I have worked in many regional markets before and have built businesses in media, the big delta for me has been working in the Hindi media industry. I am a North Indian by birth, have grown up in the North, but had worked in regional markets, where I didn’t know the language. But this time I know the language. Hindi is a very interesting and exciting market.

Why I have been excited about media over the last 7 years and continue to be is because I feel that the media industry has the potential to make the largest impact on the lives of consumers and the society. The number of hours people consume content is the highest among any other category. I fundamentally believe that there is a huge opportunity to make change and impact and shape society. That is the principle that has always excited me. Over the last one year the focus has been on how do we move the society forward.

We just don’t want to make documentary as a business, but entertainment as a business. How do we leverage entertainment to bring stories which push the society forward, bring smiles, and help a person release all the tension that he faces throughout the day. That has been the goalpost and that has been the vision of building Colors.

You have seen a lot of the regional broadcast business in India. Could you share some insights into how the regional television content business is shaping up and how it is evolving?

The Hindi market is a fairly established market, it’s history running back around 15-20 years. On the other hand, regional markets have seen a bigger rise over the last 5-6 years. The Hindi market is much more heterogeneous – UP has some different nuances than Punjab, Punjab is different from Rajasthan, MP is very different, while Gujarat has a different flavour. However, when you work in the regional markets, there is relatively more homogeneousness there compared to Hindi, which makes the market more complicated.

Another interesting thing is that in the regional markets the creative ecosystem resides in the market. For example if you look at Tamil, most creative people will be in Chennai; in Telugu, the creative people will be in Hyderabad. However, in the Hindi market, which is primarily in the North, the creative ecosystem is in Mumbai. So, that also requires a huge effort to know the consumer and understand what they want.

Having said that, the creative ecosystem in Mumbai is amazing. If you have a vision, you will find the people to make it happen for you. From a size perspective, relatively there is a great creative pool which emerging very rapidly.

These are the 3-4 key differences that I see in the Hindi and regional markets.

How do you see entertainment consumption changing with the times? What exactly is India watching – because we have seen vast differences in what India is watching on OTT and what it is watching on television?

I have a little stronger perspective on this. Based on my experience of seeing things more closely from a consumer lens, what I think is that this categorisation that there is a consumer who watches OTT, another who watches TV, and another who is on digital media, is not correct. It’s a very sub-optimal way of seeing it.

In today’s world, every consumer is on all the platforms together, but the degrees might change. Not just in the metros, but in Tier 1 and Tier 2 towns, etc., consumers are watching TV, OTT content – it could be a free app or a paid app, he may or may not be a subscriber – and the consumer is also there on the social platforms. They are consuming content on all these three platforms together. Hence, classifying that the consumer is different is wrong.

We have to ensure that the content moves fairly seamlessly across all the mediums. If the consumer is not finding interesting content on, say, social media, he/ she will move to OTT or television and vice versa. The consumer moves much more fluidly because of greater accessibility across the country.

‘Laughter Chefs’ is so disruptive and exciting in the industry from a genre perspective. We have found the show having extremely high consumption on all the three mediums together – on Colors, on JioCinema and on the social media apps such as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc. We are finding that people are moving from one platform to another depending on how much time they have, what their mood is like and so forth. 

The comedy genre has seen its highs and lows on television. While there is great demand for comedy shows, why hasn’t television been able to capitalise on the comedy genre enough?

I think it won’t be correct to blame it on TV only. There isn’t much comedy content on OTT as well. We need to find out why there isn’t enough comedy content available. If you do a sampling of all the series made across various OTT platforms, the percentage of comedy content will be minuscule, and within that, the percentage of success will be very low.

I think it’s a genre problem – it’s not so much about TV and non-TV. Comedy is a very difficult genre to crack. It’s easy to make people cry or intrigue them with suspenseful content. Comedy at a mass platform is far difficult to crack and hence, while there being lots of attempts by various people, including Colors, the number of things that have worked is not very high. For example, the last successful comedy show has been ‘Comedy Nights with Kapil’, which was launched 10 years ago. Since then approximately 9-10 shows have been done, but in comedy nothing much has fired, except what we have seen with ‘Laughter Chefs’.

Comedy becomes mass when it is for the entire family, but cracking family comedy is far more difficult.

Talking about ‘Laughter Chefs’, it is a very curious combination of comedy on the one hand and cookery on the other hand. How did this entire concept come about and how did Viacom18 identify the opportunity here?

Frankly speaking, we didn’t know that the show would do so well! We were extremely nervous while conceptualising the show as we were not sure whether the concept would work or not, but we went ahead with it anyway. The thinking process was that Colors as a brand is all about variety – there is fiction, non-fiction, reality, etc. So, Colors has always been a channel which offers a wholesome buffet of content to the consumers. Two of the properties that have been doing very well have been ‘Bigg Boss’ and ‘Khatron Ke Khiladi’. We also wanted to expand our repertoire. Comedy was missing from the mix; since ‘Comedy Nights with Kapil’ moved to Netflix, there was nothing for the masses, and we wanted to do a comedy show. But how do we do a comedy – should it be a talent show or we do a comedy involving celebrities? We chose to do comedy with celebrities. While working on the show’s concept, we decided to use cooking as a prop in the show and not serious by any stretch of the imagination. Thus, while you find some interesting ideas to cook, how to cook is not told! We have used cooking to come up with some ideas for people to interact.

So, this was the thinking process – we wanted to do a comedy with celebrities and we chose cooking as a prop, because unlike any other talent, cooking is something which is far more pervasive as a mass thing and it can connect with the audiences and is far more massy than using any other prop.

Could you tell us about the viewership that ‘Laughter Chefs’ has garnered since it went on air?

‘Laughter Chefs’ launched with 1.2-1.3 TVR when the ICC Cricket World Cup was going on. The show has grown week on week and it has touched 1.9 TVR. A TVR of 1.8-1.9 is what a top rated non-fiction show in the market garners. The television viewership of the show is in the same league as ‘Bigg Boss’ and ‘Khatron Ke Khiladi’. If you compare that with the last show of ‘The Kapil Sharma Show’, which was on Sony, Kapil Sharma’s show had garnered around 1.1 or 1.2 TVR. Thus, ‘Laughter Chefs’ is doing almost around 60%-70% more than any other show in the recent times in the comedy genre.

On digital, it is relatively difficult to make comparisons on the viewership numbers because there is no single platform to compare. But ‘Laughter Chefs’ is one of the top rated non-fiction shows on JioCinema, where it has done extremely well on the subscription model as well as the AVOD model. We are seeing the show growing organically week on week. When I look at the digital impressions, and on social media – the number of people who put up clips and who talk about the show – there are 2 billion impressions for ‘Laughter Chefs’, which is the highest for any show in the market today.