Sixteen comedians divided into four teams compete in Comedy Premium League. The Netflix show, streaming from today, will have some of the biggest names in the Indian comedy scene providing us some much-needed laughs, even as they compete fiercely, and also throw in a lot of fun. Reason enough for The Telegraph to catch up with participants and old comedy hands Rohan Joshi, Mallika Dua, Kaneez Surka and Kenny Sebastian.

We all know that comedy is fun, but Comedy Premium League shows that comedy can also be competitive. Are you guys competitive by nature?

Rohan Joshi: Yes, yes! We all have started with open mics, and that’s pretty competitive. I am competitive even in board games! (Laughs)

Kaneez Surka: I am competitive in life and while playing any games and CPL (Comedy Premium League) is a show about playing games. It’s the ultimate board game with all of us as real-life players. But we guys also know each other for so long. It was also a lot of fun!

Mallika Dua: I think it was competitive during prep, but once we started shooting, for me it was like going back to school. It was like, ‘Yeh waali team kya kar rahi hain?’ Some of the guys in my team were competitive, but I wasn’t at all!

Rohan: Bilkul nahin Mallika, bilkul nahin! (Laughs)

Mallika: Petty and competitive are two different things, Rohan!

Kaneez: Mallika’s team was actually very sweet. They weren’t competitive at all...

Rohan: Wow! That’s a backhanded compliment if I have ever heard one! That’s like saying someone was the most ‘fun’ participant in an exam! (Laughs)

Kenny Sebastian: It’s like saying, ‘She entered the exam hall with a smile’.

What made you want to be a part of Comedy Premium League?

Kenny: For me, it was a chance to work with my team... with Aakash (Gupta), Prashasti (Singh) and Kaneez together. We get so caught up in our own careers that collabs like this rarely happen. Just the opportunity to catch up with these guys and write and perform comedy on a deadline and with a structure was the most exciting part.

Rohan: Just the opportunity to be in this sandbox with all these cool people... write with some of them, perform with them, feeding off each others’ energies and all of that. Like Kenny said, we usually don’t get a chance to collaborate with such different people over such an extensive period of time. I had a great time performing with Amit (Tandon), Tanmay (Bhat) and Sumukhi (Suresh) together. It was this cool energy, and very creatively invigorating.

Kaneez: For me, it was the money!

Rohan: Wait, you got paid or what?! (Laughs)

Kaneez: For me, again, it was the team. It was two Hindi and two English comedians... we had the whole spectrum.

Rohan: Depending on how you looked at the team, it functioned as a Hindi-English dictionary or an English-Hindi dictionary! (Everyone laughs)

Mallika: I find myself isolated sometimes from the rest of the (comedy) community. So this was a great opportunity for me to collaborate... it was almost like a carnival. Honestly, this gave us a chance not to take ourselves too seriously. And I loved the whole feeling of community because anyway, because of Covid, we were all in separate places. And when I heard such great names were coming together, I was like, ‘What can go wrong?!’

You guys know each other so well and are aware of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. So who took the maximum advantage?

Rohan: Kaneez showed up in our rooms to break our knee caps! (Everyone laughs) We had to call security.... But I am the Rasputin of comedy, you can’t kill me!

Kaneez: Honestly, we all played to our own strengths, rather than against each other.

Rohan: Actually, the teams were very well-rounded. Each team had an amazing actor, an amazing punchline writer, every team had one person who could sing... it all added up.

Kenny: Normally, writing a comedy special takes months. For this, we hardly had a few weeks. So we really didn’t have the time to look at strengths and weaknesses of the other teams. Mostly, we were like, ‘Okay, you know this, you know that... let’s get on with the show’. That’s all we could do with the time we had.

How does participating in CPL add to your resume and repertoire as a comedian?

Rohan: I don’t know whether it’s added a new dimension to me, but it sure has rejuvenated a few things within me that I had forgotten. All of us have spent so much time doing sketches and videos and over the last 15 months, all of that just went away. To come back and to do it all, like Kenny just said about being in this pressure cooker environment and thinking, ‘Now, how do we not make this shitty?’ when you have just 12 hours to fix something.... That feeling had kind of gone away little in the last 15-16 months, considering we had such a large part of our career on hold. This helped me to rejuvenate some parts of me that had gone dormant.

Kaneez: We had done a show earlier where we had to judge upcoming comedians and I always wondered what would come out of me if I was put under that kind of pressure. I am surprised by how much we managed to do on CPL in such a short period of time....

Rohan: It’s crazy, right? When you watch the show, you will realise that each team created a specials’ worth of content in the space of a few weeks. It’s almost four specials’ worth of content packed into one show. Because of that a little bit of a pat-on-the-back feeling comes on sometimes (smiles).

Kaneez: It was nice to once again believe that we are not just judges... we are still active, performing comedians.

If we go a little back, do you remember your first stage show and do you still get goosebumps every time you go up on stage even now?

Mallika: Stage means different things to each of us. For me, it’s theatre and acting and for the others here, it’s more stand-up (comedy). Both require a decent amount of prep unless you are doing improv or open mic. For this show, by the time we went on stage, we had rehearsed so much, that we were actually looking forward to it. This is not something that I do usually, I don’t do as much stand-up as the rest of them. So I don’t get that instant reaction from the audience.

So it was great to be back on stage. In these Covid times, that whole feeling of a live audience being all dark and the lights suddenly coming on and you starting to perform, has just become so rare. So we really cherished our time on CPL. It was a good kind of nervousness.

Rohan: My first time ever on stage was for two minutes and it actually went better than I thought it would. What I remember most is that first laugh I got. I will never forget it... it’s got a special alcove in my brain that it sits in. It’s the happy place I go back to every time I ask myself, ‘Oh God, why do I do this job?!’ (Laughs)

Kaneez: I remember doing improv in 2005 and then stand-up in 2012-13. Everyone was actually super supportive. The first time on stage invariably is about feeling confident because you don’t know how it’s like to fail... and then you start failing! (Laughs) And then you get more and more nervous each time because you now know how it is to fail.

CPL was teamwork, it wasn’t like doing stand-up alone. It had a whole alternative feel to it. This felt more like improv to me because the whole team, we all had each others’ backs.

For each of you, what is the most challenging part of the writing process?

Kenny: I am not someone who is comfortable in a leadership position and being the captain of a team on CPL, I found it tough to turn down some of the ideas of my team members. I feel very crushed when someone says that my joke is not nice. But I got to work with such an awesome team, and it was a huge learning for me.

When you are doing comedy alone, the audience alone is your barometer. Here, I was working with three other brilliant comics. We all discussed stuff together and the whole balance of being encouraging of each other, but also being realistic about the fact that a joke may not work or how can we improve this joke, that experience was priceless.

Rohan: For me, the challenge of the writing process is sometimes just the whole grind of the rewrite. It’s not so much the creative aspect of it; it’s more about putting your bum on a chair and getting the job done. I am a very easily distracted person. Which is why I work better in a team. This was about three other people keeping a tab on me. So if I was working alone, I would have taken a nap for two hours, but with three others on the team, I made sure I stuck around and did the writing with them.

Mallika: I really struggle with the writing. I feel I am a much better performer than writer. As a captain, I had this constant pressure to prove. But after a point, I said, ‘Forget it’. I am the kind of person who can take a mediocre script to a certain level by adding a few things here and there during my performance. I struggle with a longer format in shorter timelines. And I have never been a part of big writers’ rooms... my journey has been very different. I could guide my team better once I had locked in on the script.

Kenny: Every line Mallika had on this show, she won applause for it.

Rohan: She is such a livewire performer! My appreciation for Mallika would be of the kind where I would lover her jokes, but would also hate her a little for it!

How do you deal with it when a joke doesn’t land?

Rohan: I have a crying pillow that I carry! (Laughs)

Kaneez: I have been doing this for such a long time now that even my body knows what to do when a joke doesn’t land. So I do some crowd work just to pick up the energy. In that moment, in my brain I go, ‘Beep! Beep! Beep! Damage control! Damage control! Let’s fix this! Don’t lose the audience!’ I am never like, ‘Oh my God, they didn’t like my joke!’ (Makes a crying face)

Rohan: The ‘they didn’t like my joke’ bit is for later on when you are in your hotel room. That’s when the sorrow kicks in and my crying pillow comes handy.

In the last year or so, with so much pain and sadness all around, how much have you learnt to appreciate the importance of laughter?

Kenny: Basically, the world needs us! (Everyone laughs) These days, people are risking their health to come to any venue that is even remotely doing comedy, just to get a good laugh. Any sort of relief, people are dying to get that.

Kaneez: As a comedian, the idea was always to create content. But over the last few months, I am now looking for content for myself so that I can laugh. I have realised that it is a sense of relief to just chuckle in these times.