For stand-up comedy to work, the performer should be able to poke fun at you and still make you laugh. He or she has to move with the times and not depend on the same set of tired jokes.
That way, Evam’s ‘Rant in Our Pants’ was a mixed bag. Ashwin Rao, who began the evening with a smart one on egg puffs, and Karthik Kumar had us in splits with their take on everything from baseball and restrooms to Gopi Manjoori.
City boy Naveen Richard was goofy but over did the ‘small-town’ jokes. Okay, ‘hanging out’ for the city’s ‘yo yo’ boys may still mean going to an ice-cream parlour and asking for a strawberry scoop, but so what? And quiet Bala Kumaran’s attempts at comedy fell a trifle flat.
Ashwin warmed the audience with his rants about how accents change the minute American visas arrive and everyone starts speaking of the Super Bowl and Yankees without really knowing what they are.
Next up was Naveen who was funny when he recounted how the city reacted when coffee chains set up shop here. But his comments on the lack of beautiful women in town to sightadichuffy did not leave too many in the audience amused. Surely we’ve grown beyond such jokes!
Karthik Kumar, known for his physical comedy, brought the house down as he spoke of the 222 films where he has played the ‘foreign-returned mapillai’.
“Never once have I gone there. But in the films, I’m always at the airport, either returning from ‘foreign’ or going back there!” And, he joked, a university in the U.S. was forced to start a course in ophthalmology because Karthik’s character in a film studied that course there. He did not spare anything, from IPL to Arnab Goswami “who won the elections”.
In all, it was an evening that left you laughing helplessly in parts and clutching your head at others.
