For comedy creator Steffy Sunny, 28, the joke is only part of the story. With close to a million-strong Instagram community, around 70-80% of her audience belonging to Gen Z, she has noticed a growing interest in the person behind the scripted sketches — her opinions, rants, quirks and everyday experiences. That has pushed her to experiment with more personal videos and micro-dramas, while keeping her personality at the centre of what she creates.‘It’s not just about the content anymore’“Most of my videos are scripted. It gets good views and everything but people want to see the content creator’s life. My life basically,” she says. Her random rant videos, in particular, have found an audience, with some even being turned into memes. For Steffy, that response comes down to authenticity. “It is about being authentic and honest and interacting with people,” she says.Her identity and the way she speaks have also become part of that connection. Born and brought up in Delhi in a Malayali household and now based in Bengaluru, Steffy speaks Hindi with a Malayalam accent — something she says viewers find unusual and engaging. She also draws heavily from her own personality and experiences. “I myself relate to being nonchalant, rebellious and speaking openly about social topics so I try to create content around it,” she says.Her recent video about wanting to cry at every life event — whether happy, sad, motivating or simply informative — struck a chord, clocking millions of views. For her, it was another indication that highly specific, relatable experiences can travel far.‘Shorter stories, longer scrolls’Steffy’s experiments with micro-dramas have given her another window into how audiences are consuming fiction online. “We don’t have the motivation to watch a two-hour movie all the time, but we can be very excited about bingeing a micro-drama,” she says. Her own experiment performed beyond expectations, with audiences staying engaged across episodes. More importantly, it showed her that people who followed her for comedy were also willing to watch her step into fictional characters — as long as the story kept them hooked.“The more engaging, the more relatable your personality is on the internet, the more people are interested in whatever you do,” she says. That’s the bigger shift she says she sees among Gen Z. In an endless scroll where formats can change in seconds, the creator can be the thread that keeps audiences watching. “A sketch can become a rant, a rant can become a meme and a micro-drama can become the next binge — but the personality behind it is what makes people stay,” she says.
