iWorld
Stand up comedy has been a slow romance and I am enjoying it: Sumukhi Suresh
Mumbai: Comedy is considered an art and known as one of the most powerful forms of expression for telling the truth to power. In India, personal, societal, and political satire-related stand-up and comedy shows are highly popular. These shows are popular sources of entertainment and provide happiness which may be defined as funny programs on YouTube and other social media handles.
Sumukhi Suresh, known for her sharp wit and humor, is all set to entertain her audiences on an international stage with her show “Hoemonal.” Starting from 31 July to 11 August, which marks an incredible milestone in her career as she takes her comedy beyond borders.
Sumukhi’s journey from a comedian to an actor, writer, and entrepreneur is nothing short of inspiring. Starting out in stand-up comedy, she quickly gained acclaim for her relatable humor. Her success on the comedy circuit laid the groundwork for her expansion into acting and writing, where she has continued to impress with her creativity.
In addition to her artistic pursuits, Sumukhi is the founder of Motormouth, a platform that reflects her entrepreneurial spirit to foster new talent. Through Motormouth, she has contributed significantly to the comedy scene, helping emerging comedians find their voice.
Indiantelevision.com caught up with Suresh where she shared her stand up comedy journey, vision behind creating Motormouth, the Edinburgh fringe festival, combating misogyny and much more…
Edited excerpts
Congratulations on taking ‘Hoemonal’ international! What inspired this decision and what can audiences abroad expect from the show?
Thank you so much!
Edinburgh fringe festival is one of the most prestigious festivals in the world for performers. The festival was the inspiration behind it honestly. The audience can experience an honest tale of a 30s woman trying to balance hormonal imbalance and dating imbalance. I feel the core of Hoemonal is relatable and amusing and I would love for audiences abroad to experience that too.
As the founder of Motormouth, could you share with us the vision behind it and how it supports emerging talent in the entertainment industry?
Motormouth is my endeavor to bring together writers into the writers room and create movies and shows with protagonists that are female, flawed and fabulous.
The aim is also to develop more women who can be head writers and shows-runners. I wish to be able to do the same work for other genders as I learn more about it.
Comedy often transcends cultural boundaries. How do you think your style of humor resonates differently across different audiences, especially as you take your shows international?
Comedy is most effective for me when I am most honest about what I am thinking about a premise. So when I write the show, I try to keep my jokes and observations as rooted in reality as I can.
I like to perform by personalising my anecdotes and observations so that the audience either relates to it and those who don’t end up rooting for me.
From your roots as a comedian to now branching into acting, writing, and entrepreneurship with Motormouth, how has your journey shaped your approach to comedy and storytelling?
Actually my beginning was improv and sketch comedy. This is my love for writing and acting. Stand up comedy has been a slow romance and I am enjoying it.
Each of these skills are so dynamic that there is something new to learn every day. I also think they are interconnected in so many ways that it helps in the overall growth of me as an artist.
Lastly, what is your response to the “Women can’t do Comedy” narrative around the globe as we have been hearing this misogynist remark for a decade or so and what advice would you give to the upcoming female comedians for the same?
This remark is not going away. Also this remark is centuries old now. In fact the moment I see this comment, I know a video of mine has gone viral.
The only way to combat this is to keep doing the job, making money, dreaming about owning a mansion in your favorite city and then laugh at whoever says “women can’t do comedy”.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
