Comedy Nights With Kapil-Comedy gone wrong
Sometimes the one thing that takes for you to realize what a pathetic person you are is someone just like you. The weekend show on Colors TV did that for me. It made me realize what a retarded sense of humour I had.
It takes one no more than 3 episodes to decode it.
What aghasts rather than tickle me is that the joke is always on her.
It has Kapil take cheap shots at how ugly his wife is thereby justifying why he makes passes at every female celebrity on the show. As if centuries and centuries of patriarchy weren’t enough this kind of sickening mentality finds a beguiled way to percolate through society , making us believe that even in today’s day and age a female’s job is to look pretty and produce a heir.
Then there’s the Bua in her midlife crisis insisting on being 22.Makes me wonder if it’s essential to make hay while the sun shines?
Then, you have a cross-dressed Dadi. The neighbour Palak is a transvestite too.
Makes me raise few profound questions :
(i) Is cross-dressing humour, really? Can you really laugh at some foolish nonsense just because the woman who uttered something was actually a man in a drag?
(ii) Why does a fat woman need to be compared to a bulldozer? Does anything different from the stereotypical ‘normal’ needs to be compulsorily ridiculed?
(iii) Why can’t the jokes be on the man? Why can’t we have a drunkard Dada? or a Fufa? Or why can’t Palak be male? Can men not take a joke on themselves? Hurts their ego,eh? Is misogyny here to stay forever?
The show is divided in two parts. The skit is followed by a rendezvous with celebrities.
So let’s talk of that now.
The ones who take the microphone to ask questions are jeered at. Too fat, Kapil has something to mock you for. Too thin, you aren’t saved either. You are pretty? How can you be saved. Too old, too young…whatever be it Kapil Sharma will find a way to tell you how the Almighty hasn’t been kind with you. Mr. Sharma just being mean is not funny.
Agreed making people laugh is the toughest job in show business, but that doesn’t mean you make such ridiculous halfhearted efforts. The quips drive home a question-If it’s necessary to pull someone down to make someone laugh? A wise man once said that what you laugh at reveals your character. The cachinnation should be on genuinely funny sources of amusement rather than ridicule.
It’s easy to get carried away by laughs. The quality of a punch shouldn’t be proportional to the laughter density, but to the hearts it has touched. Sadly in this case, there are hardly any.
Some might argue that it’s just another show and I am overacting. A show with a TRP of 9.5 cannot be just another show. A show with TVTs (Television Viewership in thousands) above 10,000 cannot be just another show. The anchor’s been awarded CNN IBN’s Indian of the year- 2013 beating the likes of the biggest names in the entertainment business.
In India’s small town and villages it’s this idiot box’s offering that shapes people’s mentality. So imagine what a screwed up mindset is being formed.
It takes infinite grains of sand to form a desert. And it takes infinite drops of water to form an ocean. And it has taken years of hard work for people to get rid of the chauvinistic attitude that has existed in society. The K9 productions has taken us backwards in time. What’s more dangerous than a religious Godman talk ill of the fairer sex is a family show air the same opinion. It subconsciously gets to you and you don’t even get an opportunity to resist it.
To borrow Entertainment Engineer’s standup comedian Nitin Gupta’s thought’s I’d say humour is your way to bring a change. It’s the only way to state the truth. It involves documenting the noise. Humour is but a point of view.
So here’s a request to those who what to try their hand at comedy : Let your reason-gone-mad not be insulting one liners. It’s time the slapstick, character and surreal jests gave way to deadpan, observational and satirical ones. Caricatures aren’t cool! Poke holes in the pretentious bubbles and not in one’s insecurities!
