Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Brunch
Couched in humour
Comedy chat show clips are truly at home on phone screens
I’m not your average ‘content consumer’—a loathsome epithet. (From news to art, the bloodless term ‘content’ is used to cover it all.) I don’t own earphones, for one. Send me a video link and chances are I will ignore it. I’m largely indifferent to the trend of Insta Reels. And I easily drown out Youtube’s vulgar exhortations to go Premium, while living in constant fear of people forcing me to watch things on their phone, eagerly measuring my response against their expectations. There is, however, a notable exception to my aversion to video clips: The Graham Norton Show.
Gremlins and algorithms
Through some digital sorcery, I get routinely sucked into the world of (mostly British) celebs in various stages of inebriation, seated on a bright red couch, being asked absurd questions by a bearded white man in a suit—a madcap version of Freudian analysis where inhibitions are shed and repressed memories released, all for a good laugh. The gremlins in my phone, those creatures with the deadly algorithms, have me nicely pinned down with this one. They fling me a clip featuring Judi Dench claiming never to have walked into a club—and proved wrong instantly—when I’m feverishly scrolling through the latest news on Omicron. They throw me a glimpse of Ryan Gosling, smiling coyly about being the only male dancer in a dance troupe as a kid, when I’m trying to grasp the nuances of critical race theory. It’s all unnecessary, and absolutely riveting.
What surprises me is how I have no clue who so many of these celebs are; it doesn’t seem to matter. The host’s Puck-like mischievousness, the alcohol-induced levity of the guests, and my lack of emotional involvement in the lives of all on display is a seductive combination. It’s so hard to be judgmental or exacting when you lack all context.
Transfixed by tackiness
It’s exactly the opposite with Koffee with Karan, a show I watched quite regularly during its TV run. The show is so full of context that it makes watching it a fraught experience. I hate it when a celeb I even moderately like exposes themselves as being stupid, privileged or condescending (yes, I’m a master at setting myself up for disappointment), something the show routinely does. While being entertaining and making me judge everyone, including myself, in the process. Ugh. Of course, there are episodes like the infamous one with the cricketers—a glaring example of young louts being encouraged by tone-deaf uncles—that lowered the tone considerably. But Koffee ,with its smug in-jokes and vapid rapid fires, will always remain somewhere between a silly and a guilty pleasure, a category not to be scoffed at.
The Kapil Sharma Show takes the silliness and the guilt and adds tackiness for good measure. I find myself transfixed whenever
I’m watching it over someone’s shoulder—the very definition of a guilty pleasure. In an era where the co-relation between political correctness and common decency is warped, I’m alternately disarmed by Sharma’s charm and unsettled by the show’s borderline bigotry. The antidote: Graham Norton.
TO BE RELENTLESSLY WITTY AND CHARMING IN A 10-MINUTE WINDOW IS THE HARDEST THING TO DO, AND FEW SUCCEED.
The unsexiness of forced humour
The spectral Simi Garewal, with her relentless tweeness, had boomers and pre-millennials hooked on to her Rendezvous series on Star World. We’ve come a long way, with access to a wide range of chat shows, largely American, most of which require guests to bare their teeth rather than their souls. Sounds good, but the path is in fact paved with difficulty; to be relentlessly witty and charming in a 10-minute window is the hardest thing to do, and few succeed. Of course, one can cue jokes and funny stories, but when a guest is uncomfortable, so is the audience. Forced humour is the unsexiest thing in the world. Tied with fake accents.
Behind all the laughter and the cheer is the simple joy of seeing someone larger than life revealing themselves to be, well, not-solarger-than-life after all. Relatability is that quite annoying word that we see bandied about everywhere these days; evidently, we even want our authoritarian leaders to be relatable. But to see an Oscar-winner or an Olympic champ light-headed and defenceless is a pleasure that I’ll happily take in these hypervigilant times. And now it’s back to the irresistible red couch…
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