It all gets a bit punk rock on Gainfully Unemployed. At one point, the curtain behind Punit Pania just sort of gives up and slides away. Even as a man is trying to fix it, the lights go off. Editing glitches disrupt the flow at times; the audio fades in and out on a few occasions. It doesn’t really matter too much though. Pania takes it all in stride, and the vibes are good overall. That’s kind of the point. On his new special, Pania is working through existential dread, cyclically fending it off and surrendering to it.
The set clocks in at a mammoth 100 minutes, risking fatigue and diminishing returns; no one wants to hear a guy jabber on for that long. Pania, though, is aware of the challenge ahead of him, drawing from a broad palette of thematic material presented without hurry. He’s got an informal, laidback style—chatty without the typical court-jester histrionics and exaggerations; foul-mouthed, bilingual, at times longwinded—which brings a relaxed hangout energy to the set.
The show isn’t a rigidly contained ‘performance’, and Pania uses the leeway his audience affords him to periodically go off on philosophical digressions and silly tangents. He sprinkles his routine with periodic philosophy-adjacent witticisms and one-liners: loose punchlines that double as profundities for effect.
At the centre of it is all is Pania, our corpo-employed protagonist. The broader theme on Gainfully Employed is the life and professional journey of the 20- and 30-something in the India of today. Pania is clear about wanting to appeal to a slightly more mature, professional class audience; his work looks at the bleakness of adulthood, and he isn’t keen on modifying his material to fit the sensibilities of a younger crowd.
His own life, as a corporate drone turned caustic comedian, becomes the launchpad for his reflections. He displays a sharp understanding of corporate and startup culture through the many anecdotes and piercing observations of that life, which will never not appeal to a yuppie crowd bred on internet culture. It’s here you realise that Pania is at his finest when he goes small. He has a knack of narrowing down on the most ludicrous elements of the cultural and social mores he wants to confront—for instance, his musings on company HR and the ways in which entitled higher-ups tend to behave—and deconstructing them in painstaking, laughter-inducing detail.
Pania offers a delightfully subversive spin on the life of the working comedian, a staple in comedy sets with comedians regularly blathering on about their travel stories. On Gainfully Employed, we get an insight into the non-glamorous side of standup comedy. He talks about the corporate or private gigs that don’t quite allow him the opportunity to truly practise his art with integrity, given the many restrictions placed upon the comic, and paints a vivid picture of the farcical experiences he’s had performing at such events—hormone-ridden engineering students; company bosses wanting their egos massaged; kids darting around; people rushing off for snacks and drinks.
Gainfully Employed has an existential anxiety to it—extended set-pieces devoted to Pania’s lingering despair about what it all means.
There’s also the fact that his politics veer sharply to the left—his YouTube podcast series sees him speaking out against the establishment on a pretty regular basis—which perhaps curtails commercial prospects. In fact, there’s a parallel motif running through the show here, as Pania talks about the current political climate—using Nehru as a somewhat obvious recurring punchline—as well as pointing to the evils of the caste system.
But it’s all a bonus, presented largely within the context of the material he tackles here. At its core, Gainfully Employed has an existential anxiety to it—extended set-pieces devoted to Pania’s lingering despair about what it all means. The brilliant introductory section sees him explain that not getting beat up for comedy and art counts as a win for him. Talk on your phones, he declares, don’t pay attention to the jokes; make noise, do whatever you please. Just as long as you don’t kick my ass. The punchlines are all there, but Pania is going for a deeper commentary on modern day life and professional paths in India in the 2020s.
He rages against the Instagram generation, complaining about video games and reels. He mocks comedians nearing 40 who play video games online with children or narrate stories about their school and college days in their sets. He directs his ire at the LinkedIn generation. Corporate culture, religion, sexism, politics—it’s all within shooting range. His cynicism bubbles over often, and there are moments where Pania gives in to the despair he quite clearly feels.
Just as often, he reels it back in just enough to poke fun at the absurdities of the choices that people make. A highlight here is his treatise on modern existence through the lens of posh residential complexes—all amenities can be home-delivered, every conceivable luxury is within arm’s reach. “The measure of success,” he says with a wry, world-weary sigh, “is how immobile you can be in life.” To cite an unfortunate comparison, the heavily-asterisked Louis CK was, in his earlier work, a master at this kind of stuff. Pania too rails against what he perhaps sees as the wilful stupidity, the vapidity, of society at large.
The risk with this brand of comedy is that it can come across as condescending, as if you’re speaking down from your high horse to the very people who adore you. Pania tempers those inclinations by just as often inverting the joke back to himself. He, after all, is the chief character of Gainfully Employed, and isn’t exempt from the commentary being made. And, if you look closely enough, the disillusionment is also underpinned by hope of some kind. Everything sucks, and it’s probably not getting any better. But what if it does? Wouldn’t that be swell?
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