Kanan Gill

Kanan was born in Bareilly to a Sikh family and spent his early years in Dehradun and Delhi. His father Charanjit Singh Gill, an officer with the Indian Army was also the principal of Rashtriya Military School, Bangalore. At an early age, he moved to Bengaluru with his family. He did his schooling at Ahlcon Public School, New Delhi, and The Frank Anthony Public School, Bengaluru.^[4] He pursued a B.E. degree in Computer Science at MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology. He was a part of a band where he later became the lead singer when he started writing humorous songs.^[4]

Kanan worked as a software engineer at Exeter Group, Inc., for three years.^[5] In the meantime, he participated in and won a competition called Punchline Bangalore, followed by another win at the Comedy Store in Mumbai. He then quit his job to pursue a career in comedy.

He gained popularity with a YouTube series, Pretentious Movie Reviews. He reviewed critically panned Hindi movies along with Biswa Kalyan Rath. Kanan also worked in an improvised sketch comedy show, The Living Room, on Comedy Central.^{[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]} Gill made his acting debut in Sunhil Sippy's Noor in 2017, alongside Sonakshi Sinha.^[16] The same year, Gill launched his special Keep It Real on Amazon Prime Video.^[17] In 2020, his special Yours Sincerely was released on Netflix. He released two more specials, Is This It? (2023) and What Is This? (2025), directly on YouTube, and is currently touring with a show named "Not This Again". In 2023, he also starred in the Norwegian romantic comedy called Christmas As Usual alongside Ida Ursin-Holm.

In 2024, HarperCollins released Acts of God, Gill's debut novel. It is a comedy-science fiction story based on a short story that he wrote in 2016–17.^[18]