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Sanjay Manaktala performs his stand-up routine during the Desi Comedy Fest at Cobb’s Comedy Club.
Photo: James Tensuan, Special to The Chronicle

Leila Carrillo stood in the middle of a comedy sketch involving a yoga session between a disingenuous guru and a naive student, then smiled as she turned her head to see the sketch play out all around her.

But Carrillo wasn’t physically present in the sketch. Instead, she was experiencing a new form of comedy staged inside the experimental medium of virtual reality.

“It’s such a different way of seeing a sketch,” the Oakland resident said. “Here, you’re finding your own way because you’re hearing a sound and turning around to see the other half of the punch line happening behind you.”

Carrillo was one of a handful of Cobb’s Comedy Club patrons to experience the two-minute experiment, which local stand-up comics Abhay Nadkarni and Richard Sarvate hope will encourage other comedians to take advantage of the technology.

“It’s like when talking was introduced into the movies,” Sarvate said. “People started discovering new ways to use it. We’re going to find that there’s different ways to be funny in VR.”

Entertainment companies are leading the charge to develop content for virtual reality, a technology that can trick viewers into thinking that they are present in the scene displayed inside VR headsets. The video game industry has created the most advanced VR content, but musicians, filmmakers and the pornography industry are diving in as well. Audience members enjoy the Desi Comedy Fest at Cobb’s Comedy Club, where comics also experimented with virtual reality.

Nadkarni and Sarvate, who run the Set Up, a once-a-week Tenderloin comedy club, have produced what may be the first comedy sketch expressly written and produced for virtual reality. Nadkarni also is director of the Zee TV Desi Comedy Festival, an 11-day Bay Area event featuring South Asian stand-up comedians that kicked off Thursday night.

They’re using the festival to debut “Meditation in Virtual Reality,” a two-minute video that gives the viewer a series of audio and visual cues to look around a living room where a shady yoga teacher is trying to persuade her student to ignore the fact that he’s being ripped off. (They’ve also posted a 360-degree version on Facebook.)

In a standard video, the filmmaker directs the viewer’s attention toward the eventual punch line by framing specific shots and cutting to different scenes. Virtual reality puts the viewer in the middle of the action, providing more emotional ties to the characters than is possible in regular video. But if viewers miss certain audio or visual cues, they might also miss the punch line.

Sarvate, 32, who quit his day job as a Yahoo Mail programmer to devote himself to comedy, wrote the sketch and stars as the unsuspecting student.

“Writing for VR is more like writing a play than writing a movie,” he said. “So that’s an opportunity for a new type of humor.”

However, he said, “We had to figure out a sketch that would work well in VR. We had to rely on choreography to be funny. In traditional comedy, you can just do editing to make stuff funny.”

The immediate reviews from festivalgoers were generally positive.


“I thought it was great, it was hysterical, short, sweet and concise,” said Mithuna Sivaraman of San Francisco. “It adds a whole new dimension. You could totally do situational comedy with VR. Like Gilbert and Sullivan, when you’re doing things like pratfalls.”

Somaia Salimi of Concord said she enjoyed the “invisible perspective” of standing between the guru and student, although looking around the scene did make her a little dizzy. “But that’s a problem with VR in general,” she said.

A few other productions have allowed audiences the option of watching comedy in virtual reality. During the past year, Redwood City virtual reality software company AltspaceVR has produced a series of improvisational and musical livestreamed productions with Jash, an online comedy channel created by comics Sarah Silverman, Michael Cera and Reggie Watts.

In late May, Watts, also the bandleader for “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” did a 40-minute stand-up set that was livestreamed to about 1,200 people in 140 countries, who used virtual reality viewers. Watts was represented onscreen by a computer-generated avatar, with Watts performing his routine in Jash’s Los Angeles studio while wearing a body motion-capture suit.

AltspaceVR plans to host more virtual reality comedy events, said Bruce Wooden, the company’s head of developer and community relations. “At this point, we’re just figuring out the technical ways to make it more accessible and ways to keep it rolling.”

Gartner research analyst Brian Blau, who’s worked in or analyzed the virtual reality industry since the 1980s, said that he hasn’t seen other instances of comedy and VR besides Altspace and “Meditation.”

In an email, Blau said he was not surprised that comics “want to experiment with VR, as it can be a very expressive medium. But it’s also one that artists have yet to master, and storytelling will undergo many changes. The techniques behind telling those stories will need to change to accommodate the new technology with ways of presenting the material.”

Blau, who found the “Meditation” skit only “slightly funny,” said it may be a long time before anyone finds a way to profit from VR comedy.

“It’s still early in the VR market and devices are just now getting into users’ hands,” he said. “Once devices are used more, and content becomes compelling, then certainly, we will see attempts at monetization.”

Nadkarni, 33, who kept his day job at Dolby Laboratories, believes virtual reality could provide a more sustainable income for stand-up comics by giving audiences a way to experience a club show from home.

“Here at a show, you’re laughing out loud and you’re connected to the crowd,” he said. “That sense of energy at a comedy show is not transferable. But through virtual reality, we can probably bridge that gap.” And as stand-up comics have known for eons, Sarvate said, “laughter is contagious.”

