#halfofbiswa

For this week, I attempted to watch the comedy special Biswa Mast Aadmi on amazon prime. Biswa and Kanan Gill would do Pretentious Movie Reviews of Bollywood Movies on youtube together, but now they seem to work more independently. They were both very humorous in their short youtube videos, pointing out all the absurd aspects in Indian movies (like the impossible fight scenes where people are flying). However, watching Biswa’s own comedy act was not as enjoyable as expected. Biswa is this lean man that did IT (I think) and has thin, black glasses. Clothes hang loosely off him. In the future, he looks like he could be the CEO of a tech company if he wanted to:

Instead, he’s a comedian. He talks about bugs bursting into God, and speaks in a dialect of Hindi that’s known for the roughhousers, or gangsters of the village. Tapori, it’s called. And he frequently starts laughing at his own jokes. 

There were some funny insights and joke in his piece. He talks about how he doesn’t trust ants because, like in the old stories of Indian times, if you murder someone or treat someone badly, poof! they will burst into God and God will tell them: This is a test and you failed. He talks about forging his father’s signature because it was cool to have a good signature in school, and getting beat up for it. He talks about being introduced to weed by a rock band, and finally understanding Hotel California because he could see the Hotel. 

But he wasn’t as funny as I'd expected, and there are a few reasons that I think this is the case. First, he is a very thin man that looks a little nerdy--you wouldn’t expect him to speak in Tapori, a language for roughhousers and gangster. It’s a very overconfident language.  Secondly, my cousin suggested that it’s weird that he laughs so much at his own jokes. I suggested he was stoned. Third--it just wasn’t super funny! I don’t know what it was about it--it was amusing, but it wasn’t always funny. 

I think his style of language didn’t match how he physically looked, and that was a bit offputting. I know that comedy is an act, or staged, but it can’t be inauthentic. We talked about matching what you say to your image--like if John Mulaney cursed a lot, it wouldn’t seem right. That’s what it felt like here.