Stand-up comedy: Laughter Queen

Gone are the days when we used to laugh our guts out over the mimicry of the comedians Johnny Lever and Raju Srivastav on Indian television. Now a "laughter queen" has arrived on the scene who has taken the art of imitating people away from the male genre.

Sugandha Mishra, a 23-year-old Indian classical singer and an RJ on Big FM in Jalandhar, Punjab, has elbowed her way ahead of her female contemporaries like Rajbeer Kaur and Bharti Singh due to her precise comic timing and an unpretentious script.

‘Sound memory'

"Comedy is an art like singing or music, but what one requires is a ‘sound memory', whereby a person has to tune his brain to grasp the other person's voice to give it the same pitch and tone," says Mishra, who spoke to XPRESS over the telephone.

Though Mishra failed to win this year's The Great Indian Laughter Challenge IV on a television channel, she is busy shooting for yet another comedy show.

When asked what made her turn to mimicry when she has been trained as a classical singer, Mishra says: "From an early age I used to mimic people around me. Even in school and college my friends … and then my teachers pushed me into mimicry." This she says was an inspiration, since boys in schools and colleges were looked up to as stand-up comedians.

After making a mark in her college, Mishra's biggest test came when she bagged an entry into the Laughter Challenge show. "When I got a call to come for the audition of Laughter Challenge, I was thrilled as well as nervous since my grandfather was against the idea of competing in a comic show," says Mishra.

She says her grandfather thought she would waste her singing talent in mimicry as there was no future in it. "I told him a lie to take part in Laughter Challenge," she says. She travelled to Mumbai for the audition on the pretext of entering a singing competition.

Imitating legends

But what makes Mishra's mimicry so different from others is that she can mimic singing legends like Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle along with Kavita Krishnamurthy and Alka Yagnik. "It's God's gift to be able to imitate the voices of these eminent people," says Mishra, who also mimics Bollywood actresses Sharmila Tagore and Hema Malini. She can imitate 60 different voices and also does voice-overs for characters.

With accolades pouring in from all quarters, Mishra has her feet firmly on the ground. "I know the amount of publicity I have received after the Laughter Challenge, but I want to improve and go further than this," she says.

Apart from mimicry and singing Mishra plans to do her PhD in music. "It's my dream and I will fulfil it."