A funny language

Reviewu00c2u00bb The city's first-ever Malayalam stand-up comedy night failed to deliver on its promises

Growing up in Mumbai, English and Hindi are your go-to languages, and to not offend son-of-the-soil Mumbaikars, so is Marathi. However, in our own small corners of this city, we Malayalis, aka Mallus, take comfort in our native language. And with that in mind, we experiment with a stand-up comedy show in Malayalam, a first of its kind in the city, hosted by The Cuckoo Club.

A comedy show must make you laugh. But after sitting for over an hour and a half, in a dimly lit room with no air-conditioning, we are ready to pull our hair out. Not because the ambience doesn't meet our expectations, but because the show itself is a let-down. The plusses, though, include the fact that of the six comedians who try to entertain us, two —Kuriakose and Varun Nair — do get the audience to crack up. They speak about current events with expected political bashing done tastefully. A Tamil comic, Guru Narayan, begins well and his jokes get better every time he switches to English. And a special mention must go out to the host of the evening, Andy Reghu, who keeps us engaged with impromptu one-liners, which are not in Malayalam. Had this stand-up not been advertised as Malayalam, it would have yielded a much better result.

Kuriakose

But the big minuses are that, firstly, the core idea of this stand-up, as we keep reiterating, is Malayalam. Yet there is an unseen disclaimer from the first act, which is that none of the comedians are prolific in the language. They seem incapable of holding a thought in the language. Living in a metropolitan city, we don't expect them to go all out in Mohanlal or Suresh Gobi style. But using the stage to improve their language skills is not our idea of a comedy show either. Some of them even indulge in literal Malayalam translation of English gags. And they have no qualms telling the audience members, who have shelled out about Rs 372 each, that they don't have anything prepared, when, clearly, a little homework would have helped.

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