Source- Amazon Prime Video

Rating : 1.5/5

Sorabh Pant is a comedy veteran, having started working as a comedian back in 2008. This is his first recorded stand up special for a streaming service but he has had two other specials namely “Traveling Pants” and “Pants On Fire”. The experience is reflected in his jokes, and his ability to glide forward even when a joke doesn’t land quite right. He talks about the wonders of marriage and procreation, touching on topics like conception, breast feeding and several other tangents, all related to children and childbirth.

“If you come up to a comedian and say I forgot about all my worries for the last 90 minutes, that’s the highest compliment you can ever give us,” he says towards the end. I did forget about my worries as his show progressed, but not quite in the intended manner.

The most unique part of this special was the amount of crowd work. I cannot recall any other show having this much crowd work with lines such as “This guy said Massage Oil”, and interaction on parents and sperm tests. The audience seemed to be laughing but it doesn’t translate as a connect over camera, as it is interruptive and breaks the flow of the conversation.

The show steadily moves on with generic topics like childbirth, the challenge then being to reinvigorate a topic that is done to death. He approaches this task by sprinkling between his stories, unexpected jokes and one liners. While talking about how his partner and he were trying to conceive a baby, he speaks about his love for trying and delivers a punchline that gets a laugh, but he adds a couple of words at the end that neatly wraps up the joke further“ I can try 4 times a night if you want!… ok once.” It is this sort of unexpected appearance of a good line that made me chuckle, but that was largely overshadowed by the loud and over the top shouting of punchlines that made me cringe.

He makes racist jokes in a self-aware manner in order to get away with it, but knowing you’re making a racist comment shouldn’t exempt you from being termed as offensive, such as casually dropping the N Word and making it seem like that’s how people normally talk. While talking about a possible confrontation with an African man, he explains how simple the fight would be for the African, his reasoning being an enacted rendition of a dick joke. In some places, the effort seems plainly to paste expletives at the end of sentences to create laughs, “Hey Poujah, your parents are Chutjahs!.”

Sorabh is not a political comedian by any standard but his funniest lines come from his political analogies, one of my favourites being a comparison between childbirth and 9/11. He drops these references sparingly throughout the show, thus maintaining their novelty and surprise, making them one of the few enjoyable parts of the show.

The show keeps moving steadily save for the end when he starts talking about breastfeeding and everything slows down here as many of the jokes don’t land quite right. He handles the bombs with ease as you would expect from a performer with his kind of experience. This portion also contains a few juvenile jokes about Africans and their best-known “attributes”, greeted with the quietest audience in any of the Indian specials I have seen.

The last 10 minutes are the strongest of the show where the jokes between plot points appeal to me and that keeps the audience too entertained as he builds up his story. The “I love playing with my kid” bit is easily the best in the entire special.

Overall, the show was passable at best. Sorabh has a good presence and command of his language, seeming genuinely witty in parts but his reliance on juvenile and generic jokes leaves the special with much to desire. Watch the last 10 minutes if you absolutely have to watch something in this show.

Favourite Bits: “I love playing with my kid” and “chutkula beta chutkula”

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