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From Piyush Pandey’s Fevicol-era lessons in “everyday truth + humour” to today’s meme-ready, reel-first playbooks, Indian advertising has circled back to one simple insight: humour that feels lived-in spreads. Over the last five years brands have moved beyond casting comedians as talking heads, they’re hiring them to write lines, shape tone, and sometimes run entire creative studios. The result is a distinct pivot: ads that sound like a punchline, not a pitch. This piece maps that shift with data, campaign examples and expert voices from India’s agency and media community.
Comedians As Collaborators
Across agencies, comedians are increasingly entering the process long before the camera rolls. Studios led by creators, from Tanmay Bhat’s Moonshot to Vishal Dayama’s Braindad, now handle end-to-end brand films, signalling that comics are no longer “talent” but embedded creative partners. This mirrors a wider movement where writers like Rohan Joshi, Sumukhi Suresh, Biswa Kalyan Rath, Kenny Sebastian, Shreeja Chaturvedi and Aishwarya Mohanraj are consulted not just for performance but for structure, tone and platform fluency.
As Russell Barrett, Chief Creative Experience Officer at TBWA\India, puts it, comedians and advertisers share more process than it appears: “Their sets are carefully written and painstakingly researched. They evolve material based on audience response, when advertising works well, we do exactly that.” The shift is pushing agencies towards more conversational, iterative scripting, with comics sharpening the cultural edge while agencies protect the strategic core.
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Avoiding Sameness
With so many brands leaning on stand-up voices, the biggest creative fear is a homogenised “comic IRL” tone flooding the ecosystem. Agencies acknowledge that the risk is real: when the comedian becomes the idea, the work starts to feel like recycled meme-templates rather than brand thinking. Neville Shah, Chief Creative Officer at FCB Kinnect, warns that the moment the comedian is the proposition, “you’re relying on personality, not the idea,” and only the first brand to use a comedian cleverly gains true distinction. The safeguard, he says, is keeping brand-first humour intact so each script reflects category nuance, not influencer tonality.