Kapil Sharma’s Netflix special is disastrously unfunny

I must confess I am a fan of Kapil Sharma’s humour. In the early days of The Kapil Sharma Show, I watched him and his team religiously. Then after a while, I stopped watching his show and thereafter stopped watching television completely.

After watching his disastrous one-hour stand-up act on Netflix, 'I Am Not Done Yet' which we have been hearing about for the past so many weeks, I may quit Netflix completely… well okay, nothing so drastic. But the show is a low-blow for Netflix. The humour is flat, certainly flatter than Kapil’s stomach which seems to have reached a position of impressive affluence.

Ironically he makes fun of his brother’s paunch on the show, prompting me to remind Kapil of what they say about the physician who needs to heal himself. Kapil certainly needs some healing. His never-ending “jokes” about his drinking problem get progressively tedious as he goes on and on about Black Label and other labels…is the show sponsored by alcohol brands? Why else was every second joke about alcohol?

And how many times do we get to hear about how he got drunk and tweeted to PM Modi? A joke repeated ad nauseam becomes a joke on itself.

Where was the original humour on this hour-long special? No, let me revise that. Where was humour, forget original? Kapil seemed surprisingly disoriented , as though he wasn’t sure if he should go for the kill or just stay within his comfort zone. It was mostly the latter, with the faces in the studio audiences being all too familiar: his colleagues from The Kapil Sharma Show, his wife, brother and mother. They all clapped and wept on cue. We did the same, though in reverse.

The biggest disappointment about this one-hour special is that there is nothing special about it. The tedious jokes( and at one juncture, the TDS joke) seem to be spillovers from Kapil’s long-running show on Sony(earlier on Colors). Come to think of it, he is funnier on television than he is on the OTT platform.

I Am Not Done Yet begins on the wrong note with Kapil cracking a Covid “joke”: “Six people in the audience are tested positive and they will sneeze in your face if you don’t laugh at my jokes.”

Well, Kapil. To drag a bad joke further down : I’d rather get Covid than laugh at these jokes.

There was a Vijay Mallya joke on how one needn’t rob a bank to cheat the country (or something equally vapid) and a Neeta Ambani joke about how she being “desh ki sabse badi biwi”. Apparently, Mrs Ambani didn’t laugh at Kapil’s jokes at a private show. I know exactly how she felt.