• In conversation with Vidura B.R.

Scrolling through the Instagram feed of Sri Lankan-born comedian Vidura Bandara Rajapaksa (also known as Vidura B.R.), the laughs come a little later. Before you start laughing, though, his calm nature invites you to settle back, comfortably. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the room with him in a London pub, surrounded by other guests, or whether you’re lounging back on your sofa at home – the invitation seems to reach across differences like those.

Once you’ve settled in, you’re in for a treat. Vidura’s topics are close to his heart and they cover (in a deadpan style) his origin story, his life in different lands – Berlin, the UK, and Sri Lanka being some, and what he thinks about the immigrant experience. You can’t help but wonder if the exercise is a cleverly-masked disguise for the challenges he’s had to encounter, and if so, what were they? This was one of the questions I asked him, as we connected via Zoom for a brief chat. The 28-year-old Londoner paused before he responded.  

“On average, unpleasant things are made funny easier than pleasant things are. I don’t know why that is, but that does seem to be the case,” he mused, adding that by bringing those experiences to life through a careful mix of art and craft, he had been able to make his own disagreeable moments somewhat worthwhile. 

Going where opportunities took him

Vidura first left Sri Lanka with his parents when he was around five years old. The family returned when he was 11 and he continued his education at Ananda College before moving to The British School. He spent his last years before leaving the island permanently at The Overseas School of Colombo. Medical school in Malaysia was a haven for the teenage Vidura for a short while, before he decided to change gears and get into software engineering, which landed him in Berlin. It was here that he found his love for comedy. 

“In Berlin, I hung out at shows because it’s one of the few English-speaking activities that you can do,” he told The Sunday Post. Despite the colourful and enriching experiences he got in the German capital, Vidura decided to relocate to the UK with a desire to make a living doing what he loved but not before he directed and starred in a documentary about the comedy circle in Berlin titled ‘Open Mic Days’. He still daylights in the software field in London but is balancing an increasingly successful profession in the comedy circuit as well. “It’s a good busy,” he said. 

Something distinctive you’d notice about articles related to Vidura online is the nature of a drifter people seem to have linked with him. I asked him why and how this came about. “I think that has somewhat happened by happenstance. I just never ended up staying anywhere for very long because I had reasons to move. In the UK, I’ve not been presented with a reason to move yet, so hopefully, I will stop moving around because it is a bit tiring,” he admitted. 

Of ‘Monsoon Season’

‘Monsoon Season’ is the name of his latest collection of jokes, which has also been selected for syndication on Amazon Prime Video and for Vidura, the process of compiling that was not exactly intentional. “First you get shorter spots for which you write material and then you slowly increase the material to fit longer slots that you get. Eventually, it became one-hour shows for which I gathered material from the last four or five years of my life. Turning it into a show was more about restructuring everything I had into something that resembles a cohesive piece of work,” he explained. 

Snippets from his show seem to have made a considerably large ripple back in Sri Lanka. You may have seen a clip yourself shared by a friend on a story, and a clip is all it takes to reel interested parties in. Once you’re there and listening to his jokes, if you’re Sri Lankan, you’d feel a sense of kinship with and amusement over his anecdotes, and if you’re a foreigner, well, you’d be learning about the world. 

Much like with any artform, Vidura’s jokes are not without their share of criticism, most of which happens in the comments section of his socials. “The online comments are funny sometimes because there are a few people who seem to take things very seriously and they are having very serious sociopolitical debates in my comments section. I generally stay out of it but it’s a fun little game to watch, really,” offered Vidura. He thinks it’s healthy to care as little as possible about online criticism, and he has found a sweet spot of caring to a point where it made his work better and avoid taking it personally beyond that. 

As for his real-life audience, Vidura has learnt to gain a sense of objectivity based on how they react to his narratives. “If they like a joke, it stays in there and if they don’t, it generally goes unless you like it enough to try and keep it in there in some way or maybe tweak it until they like it.” 

Performing comedy has also been an exercise in confidence-building for Vidura. “I think it’s made me a more confident person by getting good at something that’s difficult to get good at. I started when I was young – in my early 20s – and comedy has helped me grow a little faster than I would have otherwise,” he shared. 

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 

It has been a good few months for this young comedian who basically goes wherever his art calls him – it could be the Vauxhall Comedy Club in London, Comedy Cabin in Hoxton, or the backrooms of pubs close to where he lives. But his latest stop was a significant one, at least when it came to size and exposure. 

Vidura debuted at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2022. Writer Sadhana Narayanan, reviewing his show for the Voice Magazine UK noted: “Bandara has an extremely chilled and unique stage presence, aided by his relaxed and soothing voice. The comedy feels like a great conversation between audience and comic.”

Yet another reviewer, Jay Richardson, wrote for Fest Magazine: “There are no great revelations in Vidura Bandara Rajapaska’s anecdotal Fringe hour, no radical reinvention of the stand-up form… in this relaxed, undemanding afternoon show, which he performs seated throughout, only occasionally leaning forward to make the mildest emphasis, the much-travelled 27-year-old Sri Lankan gives the impression that comedy is only the latest phase in his drifting vagabond existence, hardly his vocation.” 

Despite rave reviews, for Vidura, performing at Fringe worked “well enough” but it’s not something he’d want to do again the way he did for an entire month. “I don’t necessarily think it’s my place to thrive. The usual model is, people commit for a whole month, but I don’t think that’s going to be a good decision for me going forward.” He’s glad he did it, nonetheless, even though he says he didn’t really learn anything in proportion to what he put in at the festival.