Abbas Bukhari: comedy can't be learned, you're born with it

A Jhang childhood and the entitlement of being the only son

The episode opens with Muzamil framing a question he has been carrying for a while: Pakistan has some of the best meme culture in the region, comedians who are doing remarkable work, and a sense of humour that surfaces even in the middle of wars — but somehow none of that has converted into a mainstream commercial stand-up industry. He introduces Abbas Bukhari as one of the three or four creators he actively follows, a man who has built an audience of more than seven hundred thousand in roughly two years, with content that increasingly reaches into serious social territory without setting off the usual fights.

Abbas’s origin story does not look like the Karachi-Lahore-Islamabad résumé Muzamil normally encounters. He was born in Jhang, a district inside Faisalabad division, into a Sayyid family with a respectable lineage — a lawyer father active in local bar politics, a sectarian-flavoured small-city environment, and, most importantly for everything that follows, three older sisters. He arrived as the long-awaited son. “I was celebrated,” he says, in a way that defines the next two decades of his life.

That celebration came with what he now calls entitlement, embedded in details so small they were almost invisible. The last piece of chicken would default to the boy. The sisters would be asked to fetch things; the brother would be excused. A whole household grammar separated what was expected of girls from what was forgiven in boys. Abbas is candid about how long it took to see this clearly, and how badly it served him later. “I have honestly struggled a lot because of this entitlement later in my life,” he tells Muzamil. The first year he lived independently was where it hit him: he had never picked up his own clothes off the floor.

Unlearning at UCL — and why debate did more than the syllabus

Muzamil’s instinct on this is sharp. He notes that he has spoken to hundreds of people who carry small-city insecurities into big-city universities and spend the rest of their lives competing for validation they never actually receive. Abbas’s path out is unusual because it did not come from a course book. He is direct about that. Course books, he says, mostly reaffirm what you already believe; they are read for exams.

What changed him was the parliamentary debate circuit in Lahore. He came to UCL — the University of London’s external programme — in 2015, alongside students from Defence and Lahore’s elite schools, plus a smaller cohort from Bahawalnagar and Bahawalpur whose backgrounds were closer to his own. He chose his friends carefully and protected what he calls his core. But the real shift happened on weekends, where every Saturday and Sunday from September to April he was up against teams from Government College, LUMS, LSE, IBA and SZABIST, arguing through motions that did not permit lazy framing. “If you walk into a feminism debate and start saying ‘Islam says this about women’s rights, so how can you defy that through the feminist movement,’” he explains, “the adjudicator will all but slap you in the critique and tell you that argument is not valid here. Reason with us. Logic with us.”

The unlearning, in other words, happened through repetition. Every weekend reinforced a different set of ideas in his head until the entitlement of the Jhang household lost its grip. Romantic relationships did the rest. The first time he tried to project his learned entitlement onto a woman who was not his sister, he says, he got slapped back into reality.

Becoming a husband, and the humbling that came with it

When Muzamil asks about the moment of real humility, Abbas does not give the answer the question expects. He acknowledges that a wife humbles a man — there is no question about that — but he points to something most people overlook. The act of getting married, he says, is the first time you actually form a family of your own, and that responsibility lands differently. He and his wife, Ailsa, had known each other since 2012. They married in 2023. At the start of the marriage, her salary was higher than his. He had to ask her for money. He says this without flinching. “Life itself is the most humbling experience,” he tells Muzamil. “When you start living it, the basics come back to you.”

This passage carries one of the conversation’s quieter insights. The “problematic” behaviour Abbas had judged in his own father and other men around him while growing up — he now sees was often the behaviour of someone trying to provide and earn and keep a household running. Not a defence of those behaviours, but a recognition that judgement was cheap and the work was not. “Life is not in black or white,” he says. “Life is in grey. And when you start accepting life like this, I think you become humble, and you start doing better.”

From Dunya News tear gas to Instagram, the long six years

After graduating in 2017, Abbas joined Dunya News through a three-month training programme — selected as one of five out of forty applicants — and learned mainstream Urdu broadcast journalism the hard way, which included his first experience of tear gas, his cameraman pulling him into the DSNG van and laying wet towels over his eyes. The 2018 media downsizing took the job. He moved into research at an NGO called Common Man Initiative, coached debates at schools to keep money coming in, and built one early piece of serious content: a twenty-five-minute video on the 2019 Student Solidarity March that deconstructed the political history of student unions in Pakistan.

It did not blow up. The algorithm does not reward inconsistency, and he was not consistent. By 2023 he had figured something out: people will not absorb your full intellectual case if you bombard them with it. Keep it subtle. Use a soft medium. Use a short one. Reels turned out to be that medium.

His wife pushed him into it. Ailsa was an active part of the production from day one — he did not own an iPhone, she did. The first reel pulled twenty-five thousand views and a Sunday-morning shout of celebration. The sixth or seventh, a video trolling people who type text messages in strange truncated forms, hit a million views in three hours and ten million in three or four days. His follower count went from 3,200 to twenty-five thousand in a couple of weeks. Three hundred videos later, he sits at the number Muzamil opened the conversation with.

Comedy you cannot acquire

Muzamil presses on whether comedy was always in him. The answer is unequivocal. “Comedy is a skill which cannot be acquired,” Abbas says. He puts it in the same category as poetry and a certain quality of singing — something you are born with, that you can refine but not manufacture. He was not a class clown. He was an introvert. He did not even open up much around family. But the instinct, the sense of humour, came down through his maternal side — specifically from a grandfather who, as Abbas describes it, knew how to make every age group in a room laugh.

The refinement came later. He pushes back on his own framing slightly: nobody is a comedian on day one. You do a gig. You see what works. You realise this is something you can monetise. Acquired or not, the craft has to be discovered through reps.

The medium-block, and why the real bet is now stand-up

The second half of the conversation turns into the most strategically interesting part of the episode. Abbas tells Muzamil he is hitting what he carefully refuses to call a mental block. “It is not a mental block,” he says. “It is a medium block.” The reels are not giving him the same kick. He is no longer getting frequent ideas in that format. Stand-up is what he wants to do, and the constraint is purely commercial: roughly eighty percent of his revenue comes from reel-driven brand collaborations, and twenty percent from stand-up. Of every ten brand queries that come in a week, his team currently locks six. To make the shift he wants, he has to bring that down to one or two. The revenue takes a hit. He is willing.

His track record on stand-up is the reason he can credibly make this trade. The first set, twenty minutes called Cold Shoulder, went up at a Government College-affiliated comedy platform called Mazaan Nagri in front of seventy or eighty people. It went better than the sets of comics who had been performing for two and three years — partly because Abbas had been a public speaker since school, declared the best Urdu speaker in Punjab for three consecutive years in the Shahbaz Sharif Chief Minister Punjab competitions. Stage was not the hurdle. Two or three months later he booked Ali Auditorium on Ferozepur Road, capacity around 450, ticket price 1,500 rupees. It sold out in ten days. Then Alhamra Hall One, sold out, performed twice. Then, recently, the PAK-China Friendship Center in Islamabad — a thousand tickets sold in a week. He references the Indian comics he has been studying obsessively: “They say it took them five, six years to sell a thousand tickets. When we did it, it felt dreamy.”

Now the queries are coming from Dubai in October, with the same company pitching Riyadh, Istanbul and London for early next year. Australia for shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. Two shows in Ireland. “When you start seeing an infinite world of possibilities,” he tells Muzamil, “you want to drop everything and invest in the craft."

"Edgy will not work in Pakistan, no matter how much you insist”

The cleanest argument in the episode is Abbas’s diagnosis of why Pakistani stand-up has not scaled. He rejects the standard comedian’s lament that the audience is not ready. “I have looked at this as a business from day one,” he says. The problem, he insists, is the craft, not the crowd. Comics elsewhere thrive on alcohol; Pakistani audiences are sober. That means a sober audience is appreciating the craft as it is — and if the craft is not working, that is a craft problem.

He has been talking to Wasay Chaudhry about this. Wasay’s framing stuck with him. “Don’t tell me people want edgy comedy,” Abbas paraphrases. “Tell me in numbers. How many people watch edgy comedy versus the other kind. Just numbers.” Movies that fill cinemas in Pakistan are movies the whole family will go to. Comedy that fills auditoriums will be the same. He is explicit about how a thousand tickets actually get sold: the content is rated eighteen-plus, but the audience that shows up includes plenty who are not. The only way that math works is if the parents are comfortable sitting next to the kids. “Content in Pakistan will not work if it is edgy,” he says flatly. “No matter how much you insist.”

His first set, Cold Shoulder, was built on this principle — material he would not be embarrassed to have his mother watch, or his father catch on a TV screen in a drawing room. The theme was the cold shoulders he had received in life, starting from his own household: the typical Pakistani distance between father and son, the Indian movies that played at home, the school experience in Jhang where the closest thing to Chinese food was pizza and pasta. He works by deconstructing an idea first — why does this human behaviour exist, why does this person act this way — then finding the contrast between his experience and the audience’s. Ailsa is his first test reader. If she says “that happened to you,” he knows it has happened to twenty or thirty lakh other people too.

Crowd work, safety, and the limits of what Pakistan will currently absorb

Muzamil asks about crowd work. Abbas does it well, he says, but he is revisiting whether to keep it in his shows. Two reasons. One, he has had moments where the structured set was going perfectly and a crowd interaction broke the flow — a control problem. Two, and more seriously, Pakistani crowds turn adversarial fast. The audience needs to understand that crowd work is a conversation, not a fight. Many do not. Muzamil agrees, more bluntly: he worries about the physical safety of comedians doing crowd work in this ego-driven environment. Abbas adds a softer point — the crowd needs to be on the comedian’s side for the bit to work, and that complicity has to be built over time.

The infrastructure gap: why Pakistani stand-up is invisible online

Muzamil asks where the industry can go in the short term. Abbas has a clear answer and a clear bottleneck. India ran the same play Pakistan has not yet run: produce stand-up properly, put it on YouTube, let the platforms find you from there. Karachi has had modern stand-up for eight to ten years, and if you search any of those comics, what you find is one badly produced video shot on a single camera with no sound engineering. He learned in his first show that a stand-up set requires six cameras and a sound engineer present throughout. Indian comics record a show five or six times and pick the best cut. He plans to do the same.

His own YouTube channel had two hundred subscribers when he put the Cold Shoulder set up there — a fifty-minute set on a non-existent channel that now has a hundred thousand views and pulled in eight or nine thousand subscribers. He is treating that as a starting point. Without a built YouTube base, international tours are hard and Netflix or Prime specials are impossible. The streaming platforms look at two things: the quality of the content and the size of the pull. He mentions a stat he had read recently — that Pakistani Netflix viewership had apparently exceeded Indian viewership — and uses it to argue that a properly produced Pakistani stand-up special could find an audience across the subcontinent. “If we produce content properly and market it properly,” he says, “in the next four or five years we might get a Netflix or Prime special out of Pakistan.”

The collaboration problem nobody is talking about

When Muzamil asks whether Abbas is spotting new talent in the circuit, the answer reveals a structural issue. Collaboration is hard. If Abbas brings a new comic on to open his show, the audience is there for him — they bought the ticket on his name. They will not necessarily extend the same patience to an unknown opener. The economics of giving a fifteen-to-twenty-minute slot to someone the crowd did not pay to see are difficult to make work without resentment on both sides.

Muzamil offers his own example — a WhatsApp group he ran for years in the broader content space, where established creators stayed connected with the newer ones coming up — and gently suggests something like that is missing here. Abbas acknowledges the gap. Pakistani stand-up comics are also content creators, also influencers, running parallel systems no foreign stand-up comic has to run. He hates the word influencer but accepts it for what it is. “It is a full-time job,” Muzamil says. “You are doing two jobs.”

Closing on optimism

Muzamil asks Abbas where he lands on the bigger picture. The answer is closer to optimism than the conversation might have suggested. The political system feels stuck in a loop and Abbas would, for once on record, appreciate some clarity in it — he is not pushing for any particular system, just for movement. But on the people his own age, the ones who will lead change in Pakistan over the next twenty-five years, he is hopeful. They have seen more, absorbed more, and updated more than the generation before them.

By the end of the conversation, just past the ninety-minute mark, Muzamil is closing things out. He thanks Abbas for the time and the candour. Abbas thanks him back, calling it surreal to sit across from someone he had been following for years. The shape of the bet Abbas is making is now clear: throttle the cash engine, build the YouTube base, produce stand-up the way the rest of the world produces it, and trust that the craft — the one thing he insists you cannot acquire — is enough to carry the rest.