Ask anyone from Charles Chaplin to Kapil Sharma and they’ll tell you one thing - comedy is serious business. Making people laugh is a one helluva job. Some filmmakers in Bollywood spend crores, get a few big stars, pen down a ‘funny script’, put in song, dance, shoot for 3 months and spend another few crores to market their ‘laugh-riot’, only to see empty theatres because the film couldn’t evoke a giggle.
Cut to - Jose Covaco.
The guy who can make you ROFL in just 6 seconds, many a time WITHOUT sound! Jose realized that he had a funny bone many years ago but he discovered Vine more recently and has been unstoppable ever since.
Six seconds, a mobile phone and a mad sense humour - that’s all it takes. This Vine video, in which Jose got cricketer Steve Smith to help him park his car, has over 6 lakh views on Facebook.
It’s not just cricketers, Jose has pulled a fast one on Narendra Modi too. This one is for the bhakts.
He quickly followed it up with one for the ‘sickulars’ too.
Jose was a regular guy hanging out on Bandra’s Linking Road, eating Jay sandwiches before he began as an RJ on radio and then made it as a VJ on MTV. His quirky, funny side is just an extension of what he was as a kid. “I think since the time I was a kid we were always gaffing around and my relatives would make me wear my sister’s clothes to entertain them. I’m still doing that for MTV sometimes, but not my sister’s clothes someone else’s clothes!”, he says.
This is what Jose came up with when the Mumbai Police recently cancelled Jerry Seinfeld’s visit to the city due to parking problems.
Though Jose doesn’t think of himself as funny, he’s happy others do. He also thinks different gags work for differently for different people and the internet gives everyone a chance to put themselves out there. I for one found this act by him on asking for his money back from singer Mohit Chauhan priceless.
Though a little clueless at first, Jose quickly adapted himself and his brand of humour to Vine’s 6-seconds-and-out video platform. “The crazy thing about Vine is that it’s so much like our thoughts, it’s that quick. Like the Maggi Vine, everyone had that thought, my challenge was to show you the same thing without saying it and explaining it,” he declares.
And there’s another element that drew him to Vine. “The thing about Vine that I love the most is that it’s raw and it’s straight off your phone as opposed to someone taking a DSLR and saying “Abhi idhar light dalenge, script ready hai? Arrey fumble hogaya.” Vine lets you be yourself completely and it’s the duration of a thought. And you don’t have to fill space. Which is what TV is struggling to do”.
Since Vine doesn’t have a lot users in India, Jose wasn’t getting a sense of how people were reacting to his videos until his compilation of ‘Misheard Bollywood Lyrics’ video went viral on YouTube.
“Lots of people watched it on Vine, tonnes of people watched it on Instagram but once I put it on Youtube it went viral,” Jose says. “Which then brought people back to Vine, so a lot of people who watched it on YouTube and Facebook came back to Vine and registered and started following me.”
As of now Jose is planning to unleash himself on the stand-up comedy scene, besides of course continuing to spread laughter on Vine. Actually make that laughter and general knowledge, because thanks to Jose I know exactly what happens in the AHU Room at my office.
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