In the very first minute of Zakir Khan’s new 90-minute standup special Mannpasand (released on Amazon Prime Video on 7 December), the comedian thanks the audience for watching Tathastu, his previous special from December 2022—and then promises that this show will be nothing like it. Tathastu was something of an artistic coming-of-age for Khan, a stylistic departure that saw him showing off a new skill: using comedic one-shots to set up a larger, pathos-driven narrative. And so, right at the beginning of his new special, Khan reassures his audience, “Iss show mein koi gambhir baat nahi hogi (There will be nothing serious discussed in this show).” This is only half true, as it turns out.

For the first 40-odd minutes of Mannpasand, we see Khan striding confidently across familiar territory, i.e. short, sharp jokes from his sakht launda era. Lad humour about girlfriends and breakups, jobs and joblessness, parental nagging and collegiate ragging. Socially awkward, fiercely proud young men from smaller towns negotiating the inscrutable etiquette of metropolitan spaces. For obvious reasons these loosely-connected themes are especially close to Khan’s heart.

Around the 45-minute mark, however, Khan pulls a neat switcheroo, devoting the second half of his show to more grown-up fare: fighting middle-aged ennui, caregiving for ageing parents, the poetic differences between hansi (mirth) and khushi (happiness). It’s like he has identified two strains of his fan following—the sakht launda easy-laugh diehards, and the much broader cross-section of the population he now reaches thanks to ambitious works like Tathastu and his streaming show Chacha Vidhayak Hain Humare. These include, especially, viewers who’re more used to consuming English-language standup comedy.

In fact, this is well and truly the Big Subject of Mannpasand: what happens when these two sets of people meet? What comedic hijinks might ensue when Zakir’s fandoms collide?

Two extended sequences underline this theme in Mannpasand. The former, at the three-minute mark, involves Khan’s animus against the singing, guitar-playing chap (inevitably, with great hair) that one meets at every single party you attend. Khan expertly skewers this character named Sai, after an unfortunate audience member who raised his hand when Khan asked if there are any singers in the house. I nearly snorted my coffee when he imitated the slightly frenzied reactions of the South Delhi/South Bombay crowd at Sai’s singing. “Oh Sai, he’s so cool ohmygawwwwwd”—the thing about Khan is, his delivery is devastatingly good and so his putdowns don’t have to be cleverer than this.

Like with a lot of Khan’s material, what’s left unsaid is also significant. His longtime viewers know that he belongs to a family of Hindustani classical musicians, that he used to play the tabla as a young man. Could it be that Khan is silently asking you to compare Sai’s chutzpah with the unthinkability of playing Hindustani classical music at a cool, hip gathering?

See how Khan describes Sai’s ‘code-shifting’ while singing for this urbane audience; Sai’s accent and demeanour shift visibly. “Guitar haath mein lete hi ismein John Mayer ki aatmaa samaa jaati hai. Yeh California pahunch jaata hai. Jabki hai Ghaziabad kaa. Ismein accent aa gaya—yeh, jisne saari life ‘park’ ko ‘paarak’ kahaa hai! (Guitar in hand, he is suddenly possessed by the spirit of John Mayer. He, a Ghaziabad boy, reaches California and puts on an accent suddenly. His whole life, he has said ‘paarak’ instead of ‘park’!)”

As well-observed as this little drive-by assassination is, it’s the ‘childhood friend vs girlfriend’ routine that really drives home the overarching theme. At the 35-minute mark he sets up two characters destined to collide: his childhood friend Kuntal and his new girlfriend, a super-smart Harvard-educated person with a master’s degree. Kuntal, meanwhile, is what British writers would call a ‘bumpkin’. Kuntal is loud, crude, uncouth and has no use for things like tact or a sense of timing. In short, he is exactly the kind of childhood friend Khan never wants his sophisticated girlfriend to meet.

Sure enough, Kuntal takes one look at her and blurts out, “Are you his ‘setting’?” “My Bharat is meeting my India,” Khan declares with just a hint of horror, and the audience laps it up.

My favourite part of the show, however, is a sweet, sweet long con, the kind that I didn’t know Khan was capable of before Tathastu. It begins with Khan caricaturing his parents’ decidedly old-fashioned, normative marriage. His mother is upset at the amount of time her newly-retired husband is spending with his retiree friends. This causes Khan Senior to placate his wife by claiming that he doesn’t even think those guys are intelligent or good company in the least. It’s mindless fun, he says. “Woh hansi hai…. Tum khushi ho.” (They make me laugh but you make me happy). Khan’s mother blushes, anger forgotten.

As recently as 2-3 years ago, Khan would have been content with this line and pushed no further. But this is the new, increasingly familiar grown-up version. Towards the end of the special Khan flips the equation completely, delivering a blunt, twisted variant version of this line in the middle of a bit involving relationship troubles with his Harvard-educated girlfriend. It’s like the comedian is telling us, I know things have changed and I know that women today will not put up with what their mothers did.

It’s a sign that Khan is listening to his critics with a constructive attitude, and I’m here to tell you that this will soon become a vanishingly rare quality. For the time being, Mannpasand signals an exciting new direction for Khan’s comedy, one that involves a much fuller bag of tricks than ever before. Watch it to see a mature artist at peace with his life and his place in the world, just out to have some fun. Sometimes that’s all you need for a good time.