While the late Christopher Hitchens firmly believed that women aren’t funny ( Vanity Fair article circa 2007), American director Paul Feig has an opposing viewpoint. He writes in The Hollywood Reporter that men aren’t all that funny. “Men are genetically programmed to hunt and gather. It is they who must impregnate the herd and protect the collective. And so it’s only logical that their brains would need to possess lower humour standards in order to pass the hours entertainingly with their cohorts while stalking that night’s dinner or standing guard against the enemy.”
At the Genuine Nights show at The Park in Chennai on a balmy Thursday night, Biswa Kalyan Rath and Kanan Gill — the duo who make up Pretentious Movie Reviews — unknowingly proved Paul wrong by receiving several rousing standing ovations for their act (not just because of their jokes but also because most of the members of the audience were standing).
It did help that the majority of the crowd was a Hindi-English speaking cosmopolitan crowd as most of the jokes, especially Biswa’s, was in Hindi. While his style was more on the louder side, with Hindi-smattered-with-English jokes that were further punctuated with the forbidden ‘F’ word, Kanan’s jokes were more relatable — everyday life, dating and bus travel.
In an interview before the show, Biswa and Kanan talk about how the two first met in 2013 in Bangalore at an open mic night, which they’d attend every Wednesday to perform. “There were just five of us who’d regularly take part and Biswa and I just hit it off because of our shared interests on what was funny,” says Kanan. A year later, Pretentious Movie Reviews was born, where Biswa and Kanan present acerbically funny reviews of old Hindi movies that make you go, “this movie is so bad, it’s good.”
“People aren’t interested in reading anymore. Why should you read about the movie when the review can also be visual,” asks Biswa, adding that, “In a video, there is a joke every 10 seconds. Reading appeals to a small population.” The duo says that it takes three weeks to bring out their videos. “We pick a movie, usually suggested in the comments, start watching it till it clicks and write jokes about it round the day. Then we make a list of the jokes along with the timings in the movie and then shoot the video, which takes us around five hours and then two more weeks to edit it. Three weeks for a five-minute video,” Biswa laughs. “It does take time to create good content,” he adds.
Kanan says it all started with wanting to review “any obscure Hindi movie,” and admits that they were a little worried about copyright laws but then decided that the website would just pull out the video if worst comes to worst. “We didn’t want to watch current Bollywood movies; we realised the way SRK talks no other human being does.” Their biggest audience, not so surprisingly, are the people who are at work. “Because anything that’s under five minutes is watchable and shareable and also goes viral,” says Biswa.
In all the movies that they’ve reviewed, Kanan says that Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge was the most difficult. “The way we went about it, it was just a lot of work plus the streak (at Maratha Mandir) is ending. It was the best movie of its time,” he says and Biswa interrupts, “It wasn’t a great time.”
While it’s not the first time in the city for the twenty-five-year-old former software engineers, Kanan shares his first Chennai experience. “My friends took me to Hard Rock Cafe and I felt so cheated that there wasn’t any alcohol. It really is a cafe here! Then, we went to 10D only to be denied entry because we weren’t couples. So we had to ask people on the road the best place to consume alcohol. And we finally went to US 101 where we saw a lot of men. Men who were rejected from 10D were all there,” he laughs.
The recent controversy surrounding the AIB Roast, however, has the comedian serious. “Ask any stand-up comedian and he/she would say that it’s absolutely necessary to have free speech. And anything that exists should be made fun of. If someone has taken offense to my comedy, it doesn’t affect me; it only means that they’ve found their opinion.”
