How much toilet humour is too much? Aakash Mehta confronts the viewer with this dilemma over and over again, spending an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom on his new special No Smoking, out now on YouTube. I’ll be honest, it’s not quite my thing. But it seems to go down well with his audience who lap it all up with unsanitary glee. There’s the full-body medical check-up, for which he believes he’ll have to pee in a small Bisleri bottle. The now-standard segue about bog-roll and jet sprays. There’s even the kid from his childhood who takes a dump in a bidet. He doesn’t hold anything back.
In fact, Mehta commits to his delivery—whether he’s talking about his ambition to scream out a choice Hindi profanity on all seven continents, or a comical encounter with a policeman in Australia—with such zeal that the viewer can’t help but get swept by it. Mehta isn’t challenging or confronting the audience; he’s asking us to come along with him for a ride that touches on everything from productivity-impacting inner monologues to his life as a husband, son, smoker and comedian.
It all adds a certain intimacy to No Smoking. The material isn’t exactly groundbreaking—he employs plenty of established Indian comedy tropes, from the toilet stuff to the usual staples of the travelling comedian. The set’s charm lies in Mehta’s ability to find unique insights or personal revelations within that broadly familiar terrain, delivered with nervous energy in often-crude Hindi and English. He uses the exaggerated exasperation shtick to shine a light on things that puzzle him.
There’s a great running joke through the set about the existential burden of self-awareness: a part of him is very dumb, but he’s smart enough to know it exists. And that weighs him down. The premise is a fun, philosophical one, and he mines it repeatedly for laughs. He likens this realisation to living inside his head with a motor-mouthed moron, and wonders how the sane part of him always seems to be one step behind the idiot.
A lot of stand-up comedians tend to affect a performative condescending tone in their delivery. It’s not exactly right or wrong; the choice is a stylistic one, perhaps a way to guide audiences toward the comedian’s desired goal. If you think the person on stage is way smarter than you, for example, you could suspend disbelief more easily. Or maybe you’d be more curious about the setups. Mehta goes a different direction: he isn’t self-deprecating as such, nor is he downplaying his ability or intelligence—a lot of it is, seemingly deliberately, buried in subtext—but he builds an easy, reciprocal rapport with his crowd. Even when he’s mocking them, the audience trusts his intentions. It’s an act, and everyone’s in on it.
The set’s charm lies in Mehta’s ability to find unique insights or personal revelations within […] broadly familiar terrain.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the closing gag, about the dangers of smoking. There’s a long winded setup which involves multiple people in the crowd. He drags it out endlessly on purpose, adding new layers to the build-up, only to throw out an aggressively ludicrous one-line punch at the end. The goofiness of the whole thing, the farce of it, is a great payoff, but it only works when the viewer and the performer share a relationship that isn’t antagonistic. The charming intimacy of the show is further heightened by the fact that it’s a small venue—you can clearly hear the mic catching audience chatter during the crowd work sections—and is filmed using a black-and-white filter. (As we all know, black-and-white makes everything more pronounced and immediate.)
But stage personality can only get you so far; the jokes do have to hold for an hour-long special to be worth anyone’s time. And Mehta, for the most part, gets the balance between content and delivery right. A passionate, and hilarious, rant against Instagram addiction, as well as a brilliant section on Indian food’s reliance on onions are standouts. His satirical views on the “mild racism” practised in Australia are sharp, while some slightly political material has mercifully been bleeped out for the sanity of all of mankind. The whole thing is loosely structured; he doesn’t explicitly define an overarching theme for the set, which gives him the flexibility to dig through a life’s worth of accumulated experiences and find all these nuggets of observational insight. No Smoking is the kind of comedy that exists alongside you, where the performer shows you a vision of the world that’s always been there, but that you hadn’t quite articulated it in your head yet.
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