Comicstaan Season 3 review: The chinks start showing in dull, overcrowded instalment of the comedy competition

There’s a joke that Kusha Kapila, the new host of Comicstaan — the third season is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video — delivers in the fourth episode to explain her arrival. “Change is the only constant. And in Comicstaan, that change is the female host.” Before Kapila, the comedy competition — produced by Only Much Louder (OML) — has gone through two different female hosts: Sumukhi Suresh in the first season and Urooj Asfaq in the second season. Besides the fact that Kapila is the first non-comedian host of Comicstaan — presumably tapped to make the show more Instagrammable — the punchline is a clever-commentary on the ultimate fact about the Indian entertainment industry: the dispensability of female entertainers. In comparison, Abish Mathew, the unremarkable male host of the competition, has remained unchanged over the course of the three seasons.

In Comicstaan, the female host is a bait; someone supposed to convince different sections of audiences into watching the show. It doesn’t help then that Kapila is atrociously styled throughout the eight episodes or that her inexperience shows. In episode after episode, Kapila keeps staring at the teleprompter evidently placed above the camera instead of looking straight at the camera. It feels a lot like someone talking to you while staring at your forehead. That’s not to say that Mathew doesn’t read out his lines from the teleprompter as well. He does but the comedian also frequently keeps making eye-contact with the audience, making Kapila’s rookie mistake seem all the more glaring. Even then, it seemed like the kind of thing that could be easily avoided or rectified — the producers could’ve easily asked Kapila to memorize her lines and use the teleprompter as a back-up option. That chose to do anything about is only the first instance of the chinks revealing themselves.

That is to say, the third season is stacked with such perplexing decisions that undermine the comedy competition — arguably, the most rewarding reality show format in the streaming era — from unlocking its true potential. For one, the decision to have seven mentors (Kanan Gill, Rahul Subramaniam, former Comicstaan contestant Prashasti Singh, Aadar Malik, Rohan Joshi, Sapan Varma, and Anu Menon) and four judges (Sumukhi Suresh, Neeti Palta, Kenny Sebastian, Zakir Khan) seems difficult to justify, especially when the performances of most mentors in the season turn out to be even more disappointing than the contestants.

If anything, it makes the season more crowded — and for no good reason. The judges, for instance, come off as helpless spectators from time to time. That the competition feels tamer than usual with not a lot of memorable sets coming out of this season is another sore point. In that, Comicstaan’s third season is a lacklustre installment of the competition, livening up only when it wholeheartedly embraces the irreverence that defined the first two seasons.

Take for instance, the hilarious cold open that revolves around a silly gag about Baba Sehgal refusing to rap and deciding to show off his other musical talents instead. It’s a clever device to introduce the re-designed format of the show: a new host, eight contestants from the usual bunch of ten, seven mentors tackling one genre each, and four judges. On his part, Sehgal has fun with the assignment, writing mindless lyrics that rhyme “Sumukhi’ with bekhudi and call harem pants angrezi dhoti.”

The two standout episodes of the season lean into a similar brand of eccentricity, which to me, felt like an apt foundation for the unpredictability of stand-up comedy. In the third episode, mentor Aadar Malik takes charge of the improv episode, dividing the eight contestants into two teams and tasking them with being funny on the spot. Any stand-up comedian is only as good as their instinctive ability to make a punchline out of everything and nothing. And this sparkling episode felt like it put the eight contestants — Aman Jotwani, Shamik Chakraborti, Aashish Solanki, Shreya Priyam, Pavitra Shetty, Gurleen Pannu, Natiq Hasan, and Adesh Nichit — through a wringer in the truest sense possible, placing them in situations that simultaneously underlined their wit and their reflexes.

During this season, my constant grouse was the fact that the eight episodes didn’t quite acquaint viewers with the specific comedic styles of each contestant. I could see that these were eight talented comedians but I rarely got to understand what it is exactly about their comedic styles that made them so unique. The only time Comictsaan came close to truly exhibiting the importance of a comedic voice was in its fourth episode. Mentored by ex-AIB founder Rohan Joshi, the roast episode saw the eight contestants at their offensive best. Besides being an immensely satisfying episode (if there is one person qualified to be a mentor to comedians, it’s undoubtedly Joshi) littered with zingers, the episode stood out for making an important distinction between an easy joke and a clever joke.

These two episodes stand out all the more simply because the remaining five challenges a drag for several reasons, undercutting the show’s reputation as a lean production. The Sapan Varma-led “topical humor” episode plays out like a joke not only because contestants stray far away from taking any political stands. But because no one really sticks to the headlines, interpreting the theme in keywords (unemployment, crypto currency) rather than intelligent segueways. Kanan Gill’s alternative comedy episode felt similarly let down by the really superficial interpretations of the genre. Rahul Subramaniam’s opening anecdotal episode and Anu Menon’s sketch comedy episode are lifted by a few bright spots.

The lack of uniformity spills over to the judging processes as well. As is the case with Indian stand-up comedy in general, contestants who performed their sets in Hindi (Aashish Solanki, Gurleen Pannu) fared better than the contestants who delivered sets in English (Shamik Chakraborti, Pavitra Shetty). Granted, Hindi is inherently a funnier language than English to land punchlines. Still, for a competition aimed to reward “promising” talent, I wish the eight contestants were judging in a way that honored the comedic grammar of both languages.

Both Chakraborti and Shetty — boasting comedic styles that could become personal catchphrases — were repeatedly told by the judges that their comedy wasn’t exactly capable of appealing to everyone and that they needed to find their own audience. It’s for this exact reason their absence in the top four personally felt like an oversight. The point of Comicstaan shouldn’t just be to crown comics can appeal to everyone; who seem like the safest, most obvious choices for pulling off sold-out shows. At a point when Comictsaan is equipped to catapult comics to stardom, the purpose of the competition should be to challenge the audience instead by backing unconventional voices and making a thorough case for why people should buy tickets to their shows. One look at the over-saturated stand-up comedy ecosystem is enough to conclude that the Indian comedy scene doesn’t need new comics as badly as it needs new voices.

Yet in its third season, Comicstaan sticks to finding a new comic. To me, the Chandigarh-born Gurleen Pannu, a sure-footed, physically alert comedian embodied the very reason why competitions like Comicstaan should exist: to spotlight comics who play against the audience’s expectations. Besides boasting a sensational comic-timing, Paanu exhibited an inherent ability to intimidate the audience while sweet-talking to them, a tussle that made her sets worth remembering. It says a lot about the direction of Comicstaan that the one contestant who destroyed every episode of the season, wasn’t crowned the winner. After seven weeks of following a cumulative point system that saw Pannu leading with a margin, the show chose to ditch it for the final episode.

The winner of Comicstaan then was chosen on just the set they performed on the final day of the competition. If anything, the winner with his penchant for the conventional setup-punchline-setup-punchline format, proved to be the safest choice possible.

Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on Twitter.

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