Comedy, writing, and building a career without a plan
With Zakir Khan · Hosted by Raj Shamani
Episode summary
Comedian and writer Zakir Khan joins Raj Shamani on Figuring Out to talk about how a boy from Indore became one of India's most loved storytellers, why he still writes every day even when no one is watching, and what comedy has taught him about building an audience that stays. The conversation covers his early open-mic failures, the discipline behind his writing process, the relationship between pain and good jokes, and why he believes the best Indian creators are the ones who refuse to leave their hometown.
Key takeaways
- 1.Writing is a skill you can learn; the voice that makes it worth listening to comes from the life you survived.
- 2.Audience growth on the internet is a byproduct of consistency, not a goal you can chase directly.
- 3.The biggest mistake new comedians make is copying the successful comics they admire instead of finding their own source of truth.
- 4.Leaving your hometown is sometimes necessary, but staying connected to where you came from is what keeps the material honest.
- 5.The most durable Indian creators treat their craft like a job long before it pays like one.
Full transcript
Transcript edited lightly for readability. Timestamps refer to the YouTube video above.
Zakir, welcome back to Figuring Out. I want to start with something I think a lot of people don't know — you still write every single day. Why?
Because I can't trust my brain on a stage. The stage is where the work gets presented, but the real work is the hours nobody sees. If I don't write, I don't perform — I just repeat myself. And repeating yourself is the fastest way to lose the audience.
You've been very open about the fact that your early open mics were empty rooms. What kept you going?
Ego, honestly. I thought I was better than the empty rooms. But ego only works if you can back it up. Every night I went home and wrote another joke. After a while, the rooms stopped being empty because the material stopped being mediocre.
How much of your comedy comes from real pain?
All of it. The jokes that last are the ones that hurt first. Comedy is just pain that has been processed long enough to become shareable. If you try to manufacture that without living it, the audience smells it in thirty seconds.
What's your advice to a kid in a small town who wants to do what you do?
Start where you are. Record on your phone. Post it. Get embarrassed. Learn from it. The internet doesn't care where you're from — it cares if you can make people feel something. But don't leave home just because you think you have to. Sometimes the thing that makes you different is the town you want to escape.
Final question — what does success look like to you now?
Freedom to say no. Freedom to not do a show because I don't believe in it. That's the only real success. Everything else is just receipts.