Family Time with Kapil Sharma
Rating - 0.5/5
Welcome to Family Time With Kapil Sharma, where laughter is made up and scripts don’t matter.
If you, like me, wondered what could be worse than the pilot from last Sunday, you are in for a bit of an enlightenment. The second episode from Saturday evening struggled to keep things funny in the face of a shoddy (or non-existent) script. Long pauses, pathetic attempts at childish humour, repetitive gags and awkward silences, this one had it all.
Our journey looked promising at the offset. Kapil opened the show by talking about children and childhood. He recounted how his mother would beat him up for falling sick and it almost seemed like he had finally decided to go back to his earthy, relatable brand of humour, the kind that won him all his fans in the first place. However, a few lines in, he quite visibly ran out of things to say.
Co-host Neha Pendse arrived on stage to rescue him but the silences only got longer and more awkward. Kapil tried to pass off not having any jokes as an attempt at flirting but that thickness in the air wasn’t fooling anyone. The two stood still like kids asked to dance at a neighborhood Mata Ki Chowki, him looking for words in his head and her uncomfortably smiling through her teeth. What bothered her more? The flirting or the extempore skit they were about to perform on national television?
To kill the tension, Kapil decided to employ the most basic, unimaginative form of humour: making faces. Like a five-year-old getting scolded at school for not doing his homework (not too different from our host here), he scrunched up his face and pulled out his tongue behind Neha’s back in almost a minute-long gag. Navjot Singh Sidhu, who can burst into giggles at a rotting peach at this point, of course, laughed.
Thankfully, there are still Kiku Sharda and Chandan Prabhakar to save the day (or at least a few minutes). Kiku got a thunderous applause and a roaring chant of his name at his entry on stage which he followed well enough with his oft-seen-but-still-slightly-different-every-time bit as Bumper. Chandan, in what felt like a few unpremeditated raw minutes, poked Kapil’s belly and asking him to stop sucking in his stomach. On any other day or on any other show, the bit would not have made it out of the editor’s room but considering how an audience member’s recitation of ‘Hazaron Khwaishein Aisi’ made the final cut proves how desperate the director was.
Two episodes in, things are not looking good at all for Kapil or his show. There is only so much you can wing in the absence of a thorough script. A few attempts later, the cracks eventually give in to reveal how hollow the structure was all this while.
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