There are many Indian politicians who are known for their wit but Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has become the first to attempt an actual stand-up routine. On One Mic Stand - Season 1 which premiered on Amazon Prime on November 15, the Kerala politician gamely takes up the challenge of entertaining the audience with his comedy.
Mentored by comedian Kunal Kamra, Shashi Tharoor performs a nearly 10-minute set in the 33-minute long episode that begins with the behind-the-scenes of the production. Tharoor, we're told, has had only 24 hours to prepare his material and his mentor Kunal Kamra is a bit worried on his behalf. Can the Kerala politician pull it off? But before we see Tharoor in action at the Comedy Club in Delhi, Kunal and Sapan Verma of East India Comedy warm up the audience with jokes ranging from a journalist the nation really knows to the embarrassing biopic on PM Narendra Modi which had Vivek Oberoi in the lead.
In his discussions with the comics, it's clear that Tharoor already has a pretty good idea about what will work with the audience. His famous English obviously tops the list, and it's no surprise that he gets a loud round of applause when he hands over an Oxford English dictionary to someone in the audience just so they're on the same page as he's in. Tharoor does a neat job of mining his English skills for humour, using it to explain why he chose Thiruvananthapuram as a constituency and then turning it into an opportunity to take a potshot at BJP's Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
The Caesar salad joke that we saw in the promo is still funny the second time around, but Tharoor isn't quite done with the BJP jokes. From throwing a reference to the chowkidhar campaign to fake news about UNESCO, Tharoor is in his elements when he goes after his political rivals. However, the jokes on colonialism (his speech at the Oxford Union had gone viral in 2015) seem to have been a tad too erudite for the audience. Tharoor appears to sense this for there's a shift in his body language, and he employs the trick of laughing more to get the audience to laugh with him. He gets back in the game with his jokes on millennials and their abbreviated lingo, which is in sharp contrast to how he speaks.
Didn't find him funny? You can always blame it on Nehru, he says to an audience which gives him a standing ovation at the end of the show.
Though Tharoor is a well-known writer and speaker, stand-up comedy is a whole other ballgame. He's the only one among this season's comics - Taapsee Pannu, Richa Chadha and Vishal Dadlani - who isn't a professional performer.
And if it's indeed true that the politician had just 24 hours to come up with this, there's no need at all to be recalcitrant in laughing along. After all, YOLO.