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 de
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 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 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. 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. With one pun after another, the series #GameOfPuns was born,” he shares and 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 and yet she makes sure that she shows it to everybody she knows,” he adds.
#GameOfPuns 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 media, 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 regular memes, 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, are travelling in a train or just 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),” he signs off.
