Kapil Sharma’s Netflix Special Is Disastrously Unfunny

I Am Not Done Yet (Netflix, One-Hour Special With  Kapil Sharma)

Rating: *

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.