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 or aren’t aware of the show — 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 in 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 Mumbai-based man behind the 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. Lately, I have developed a taste for these. 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 thus #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 on the page but yet she makes sure she shows it to everybody she knows.”
The 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, which I think is awesome considering we had just started out,” says Viraj, who has been doing topical memes about trending topics, video memes, mash-up videos like Angelwaale — a mashup of 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 lookout for the next joke. Memes are all around us, all you have to do is find them (and also make them).”
