Summing up a megacity’s culture in a line or two is tricky at the best of times. Nonetheless, having lived in Delhi for close to 12 years now, I will say this about my adoptive home—we have an incredible appetite for the macabre, the darkly funny, anything one might call gallows humour. The other day I saw a group of teenagers miming a bike-on-bike collision in the mohalla that had, in fact, caused a serious head injury to our neighbourhood barber. One man’s misfortune will, inevitably, become snigger-fodder for another. It’s a fact of life here, and one that Aakash Gupta—very much a ‘Delhi funny guy’—knows well.

This affinity for the morbid joke is palpable on his debut special Angry Young Man (e-tickets available for INR 299 on Paytm Insider until 23 December; the Insider website hosts the special). There’s a hilarious extended bit, for example, that personifies the coronavirus as a confused, somewhat hurt pathogen baffled at the fact that Delhi veterans just… do not seem to fear death the same way as regular folks. There’s a fine line between bravado and foolishness—and Delhi snorted that line up its nose a long time ago. This, for example, is about Delhi citizens proudly and openly bursting firecracker upon firecracker after the Supreme Court explicitly forbade them:

“Pataakhe bhi nahi fod rahe hain, skyshots phod rahein hain! Police waalon, mujhe pakadnaa chahte ho? Yeh lo meri location! (They’re not just bursting firecrackers, they’re bursting skyshots. Police, you want to catch me? Here’s my location.)” For that last line, Gupta does a splay-legged, left-hand-aloft Freddie Mercury pose, to heighten the funnies. It’s brilliant and it tells you something about the levels of chutzpah found routinely in Delhi.

In the first half of Angry Young Man, there’s plenty of material about his Europe travels. You’d think this is well-trodden ground. But listening to somebody like Gupta on this topic is very, very different from listening to somebody who grew up in Bandra. When a curt, older desi woman (a restaurant owner) in Paris chastises him in street Hindi and asks him to cease-and-desist with the broken French, a chuffed Gupta says, “Maa!” I don’t think the humour of this situation can be adequately explained to a Bengaluru tech-bro, or a Bandra hipster. When Gupta notes, “Wahaan jhagdaa nahi hota” about Indians and Pakistanis abroad, he is correct in his observation that out there, it’s pragmatism that guides Indo-Pak interactions there, not chauvinistic chest-thumping. “Warna visa cancel ho jaayga na? (otherwise your visa will get cancelled, no?)”

I also enjoyed Gupta’s skewering of the stoner subculture which has gained footholds in various far-flung corners of the country. Don’t call us charsi and ganjedi, Gupta is told by self-described stoners, causing him to retort “Angrezi bolne se kya hogaa, hai toh tu ganjedi hi (what will speaking English change, you’re still a ganjedi)”—a smart putdown of stoners that also gives you an invaluable window into language and social hierarchy in India (especially the Hindi-speaking parts of the country). There’s a joke here about the show Narcos that ought to be shown to the makers of the series; it’s that good, and in a wholesome, Insta-friendly way.

What gives all of these jokes that little extra something is Gupta’s skill as a performer. This was already evident during the second season of Comicstaan (which he ended up winning alongside Samay Raina), but time on the road have refined his stage skills further. I read in an old interview that Gupta went to professional clown school (or commedia dell’arte, if you’re hoity-toity) and that explains a lot. He has a certain frog-eyed hilarity to his expressions and I have no doubt watching him up close in person amplifies this aspect. His energy levels are relentlessly high, he leaps and jumps and crouches and squints. There are no half-measures. He makes full use of his physicality, and that’s a relatively rare trait among Indian comedians.

There are no half-measures. He makes full use of his physicality, and that’s a relatively rare trait among Indian comedians.

What Angry Young Man lacks though is a sense of coherence. Individually, a lot of the jokes here land quite well. But the show as a whole struggles to create a unique identity as a text. Look at the different specials Kanan Gill or Biswa Kalyan Rath or Zakir Khan have performed—all of these specials have different personalities, different tonalities. Most importantly, each special is a coherent, standalone text with a well-defined beginning, middle and conclusion. They set up expectations with first-half jokes and then in a lot of cases, pull the rug from underneath the audience by subverting those same jokes. This takes time and patience and considerable craft to properly execute.

I think this is where Angry Young Man could have done better. This is only Gupta’s first stab at putting together a 60-minute special and he will no doubt improve as a writer. That complaint aside, I felt this special underlined Gupta’s promise as a comedian and is well worth your time and money. In fact, if I had been shown this special before purchasing the ticket, and asked to pay what I wanted, I’d have happily paid twice the price-of-entry.