On most days, you will find 23-year-old Viraj Pradhan “watching movies or a TV series, catching up on some good stand up or cracking jokes”. On other days, he will be working on his Game of Thrones desi puns that will have you rolling on the floor quite literally!
Even if you aren’t a fan of Game of Thrones — which would also imply that you have been living under a rock — the puns don’t require an IQ as high as Albert Einstein’s to make sense.
“Bhai ab late ho raha hai. Tu Arya hai ki main niklu?”
What does Jamie Lannister eat when he is Punjab? Cersei ka saag aur makki di roti.
I asked Daenerys, “Why didn’t Drogo come to work yesterday?” She said, “Khal Drogo bimar tha!”
The man behind the secret of this rib-tickling humour shares his trade secret: “I love talking,” says Viraj, who is based in Mumbai. “I love doing amateur stand-up gigs or talking in puns. English puns are fun, but Hindi or Marathi puns are extremely funny. So, one fine Sunday afternoon I came up with the ‘Cersei ka Saag’ joke and a few people loved it. Right then, it hit me I could actually do an entire series of puns dedicated to every character from the show and one pun after the other, the series #GameOfPuns was born,” says Viraj, who credits his friends Divya Makhijani, Aaron Machado and Chetan Asher who have been a big support. “My grandmother doesn’t exactly understand what I do, yet she shows it to everybody!” he grins.
‘Game of Puns’ is a series of posters that are put up on the two-month old Facebook page, Just Generic Things. “Since the time I’ve been working in digital, I have been using the word ‘generic’ a lot. That’s how I came up with the page name — where we try to find the ‘funny’ in everything generic, right from movies to TV shows, from cricket to politics. The first video we did was called ‘SULTANPOOL’, a mash-up of Sultan and Deadpool which got close to 25k views,” says Viraj, who has also been topical memes about trending topics, video memes, mash-up videos like ‘Angelwaale’ — combining Dilwale and Taher Shah’s Angel.
“Whether you are out shopping, traveling in a train or having awkward conversations at a cousin’s wedding; always be on the look out for the next joke. Memes are all around us, all you have to do is find them (and also make them),” he signs off.
