Anu Menon, who you may fondly remember as Lola Kutty, Channel [V]’s “beauty on duty” in the ’90s, is back in action and coming soon to a screen near you.
One of the funniest VJs on Indian television, Menon’s alter ego Lola Kutty—clad in gaudy Kanjivarams, bulky gajras, nerdy glasses, with her sidekick Aah-lex and that unbeatably thick Malayalam accent—gave Channel [V] some of its best short-form properties, aired during commercial breaks, expanding into brief talk shows with celebrities.
She has since been a regular on the theatre circuit, making a move into standup comedy a few years ago with South Indian comedy collective, Evam Standup Tamasha. On Friday, 14 June, her first one-hour special, Wonder Menon releases on Amazon Prime. This is the first solo special by a female comedian on the platform, worth noting only because they have previously been slammed for signing up only men (14 of them) in the first bunch of commissions in 2017, and only just seem to be catching up.
The thing everyone’s been paying attention to is this: All the promotional activity leading up to the release of Menon’s first special features Lola Kutty.
Menon invoked Lola to get people to come out for the taping in March at That Comedy Club in Bangalore.
Then there was this official promo, which made it look like the special might feature both Menon and Lola Kutty—either in a cameo as in Aditi Mittal’s first Netflix special, which featured her character Mrs. Lutchuke, or as a device, as in Varun Thakur’s Amazon special, Varun This Side, Vicky That Side, in which Thakur’s alter ego got a whole half-special to himself.
Kutty is missing in the official trailer, however, which shows us snippets of material from the special.
But hopers gonna hope. And it didn’t help that she put this comic strip out today:
So the question on everyone’s mind (and flooding her comments section) is this: IS LOLA COMING BACK OR NOT? As she herself likes to say, “You can give an elephant, but you must never give hope.”
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