Their comedy podcast The Internet Said So (TISS) has been dissecting Bollywood’s biggest hits, flops, and strangest trends for years. Now, comedians Varun Thakur, Aadar Malik and Kautuk Srivastava have taken that obsession to the stage. Their new live show, Bollywood Postmortem, arrives in Hyderabad on June 7 at district150 by QUORUM, promising a hilarious yet surprisingly detailed deep dive into the state of Hindi cinema.
Presented by Funnybuzzness by Buzz Kya Entertainment, founded by Sakshi Atree and known for running one of the country’s longest-running comedy IPs, the show combines research, nostalgia, and sharp humour to examine Bollywood’s evolution over the past decade. Ahead of the Hyderabad performance, the trio speaks to CE about their research process, Bollywood’s changing landscape, Salman Khan, and why Hindi cinema remains comedy gold.
Excerpts
What is Bollywood Postmortem?
Varun Thakur: Bollywood has been one of the most popular topics on our podcast for nearly six years. Our audience loves to hear us talk about films, and that’s where the idea for this show began. As we started digging deeper, we found something fascinating. Looking at Bollywood’s performance over the last decade, only a small percentage of films have actually succeeded. For an industry that produces hundreds of movies every year, that’s quite a statistic. It made us wonder: what exactly has changed? The show is our attempt to investigate that question. It’s a deep dive into Bollywood’s successes, failures, trends, and contradictions.
Aadar Malik: All three of us are huge Bollywood fans. Between us, we’re actors, writers, and musicians, so we’re closely connected to the creative process. What fascinated us was how dramatically Bollywood changed after the pandemic. The way films are made, marketed, and consumed today is very different from what it was even a decade ago. In many ways, the show is like a research document. We’re trying to understand what went wrong, what changed, and what Bollywood’s future might look like.
Kautuk Srivastava: Think of it as a PhD thesis for which we’re getting no doctorate!
