The misadventures of Shamik Chakrabarti lie at the heart of his new special. With understated ease, Chakrabarti takes us through vivid sketches on everyday life in India, all stemming from the one time he forgot his brand new laptop in an auto in Mumbai. This one (commonplace) occurrence serves as a throughline in Despite Appearances, punctuated by extended departures into our cultural quirks as a people as well as his own eccentricities. 

From a police station in Bandra, he heads off into all sorts of directions. In one of the standout sections here, we go on a safari through a muted-out tiger reserve in Karnataka, where Chakrabarti’s bemusement builds with each observation: a tiger reserve filled almost entirely with deer; a pregnant elephant chasing them because their guide can’t keep his mouth shut and, well, a man in a tiger suit. We spend time with him at the doctor’s, after he’s injured his back bending down to place a football on the ground. There’s also an lengthy meditation on driving as an art, as a form of self-expression. Driving in India, of course, is well-worn territory in desi comedy, but Chakrabarti packs his own treatment of the subject with such hilarious insight and throwaway gags that the whole thing feels fresh and full of life. 

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Here, it’s essential to spend a bit discussing his delivery. It’s somewhat distinct, at least within the Indian comedy landscape. Chakrabarti bypasses the big and easy laughs that are often a result of the performer’s showiness. He speaks in a deadpan, with a dry and absurdist inflection, deliberately avoiding the higher registers. Despite Appearances is littered with laugh-out-loud moments (there’s one about school shootings in the US that garners an especially outsized reaction from the crowd), and Chakrabarti remains a strong punchline writer. But, in essence, his style doesn’t strictly conform to the setup-buildup-punchline-long-pause conventions. 

Instead, his true strengths lie in observation, rumination, and storytelling, venturing into absurdist banality and allowing for a more measured build up. The presentation is of a guy narrating his life’s woes—with a self-effacing geniality—who just happens to be funny. Thus, we get very few of those choreographed long pauses that comedians love to sit on, which allow the audience to laugh and get up to pace. Here, instead, there’s a lilting rhythm to the set. Chakrabarti packs in a lot of detail: we get weird characters at police stations with rich inner lives; a treatise on red tape and paperwork; clever observations about desi mannerisms and hand gestures; comical self-reflection; and just a general air of befuddled discontent at trivial behaviours we face and ignore each day. And each bit is stuffed with jokes that the audience needs to register while he has already hurtled forward in the tale. 

Chakrabarti has a strong voice in his comedy, with performance and writing working together to deliver something intentional.

The story of the lost laptop is the central conceit of Despite Appearances. He uses it as an anchor to keep the audience on board, breaking it into several parts before returning to it for a sense of closure. It’s crafted with great care—from his own stupidity and his immediate reaction to having committed such a grave blunder, to the Bandra and Khar police stations, where sections glitter with chaotic insight into procedural red tape and a fish-out-of-water curiosity, all the way to the plot twist at the end.

After each act of this central story, Chakrabarti breaks into unrelated digressions and long, elliptical interludes—which themselves serve as standalone sketches—that add a lot of colour to the show, and allow him the chance to flex his joke-writing skills beyond the self-limiting narrative scope of the lost laptop. There are minor complaints here: personally, the section about his height didn’t quite land. It starts off with a great punch as he details the resentment that people online feel against him because of his height (a rather massive grouse within the manosphere). But it lapses from there into a kind of slapstick that isn’t quite his strength. He immediately follows it up with the jungle safari though, which remains thrilling and action-packed from start to end.

It’s a challenging task to hold it all together, given his even-keeled and unassuming delivery which, when he’s not going for the big punchline, can sometimes feel opaque to a casual viewer. But Chakrabarti has a strong voice in his comedy, with performance and writing working together to deliver something intentional.