There are only two eternal, universal taboos that persist across human society: sex and death. “The front door and back door of the world,” as William Faulkner once characterised them, are such a potent source of enchantment, anxiety and terror that we’ve built entire ideologies and religions around them, crafting esoteric vocabularies so that we can tip-toe around them, dreaming up elaborate rituals and traditions in an attempt to contain and tame them. Not even the Twitter porn-bots and the OnlyFans-ification of desire has managed to strip sex of its dangerous mystique, while the spectre of death, to quote anthropologist Ernest Becker, “haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity.” 

Which is perhaps why these two subjects are so appealing to a certain brand of transgressive comedian, specialising in subversive humour. Having taken on sex—with all its attendant ickiness—on his 2023 special Nasty (which we loved by the way), Aakash Mehta turns his attention to death. His new two-hour special Dark—available to watch on Paytm Insider from 2-25 August—takes aim at death, with all its absurdities and indignities, but also its “after-effects”: the ridiculousness of funeral rites, the petty family drama, the grasping at superstition when faced with our mortality. 

Stripped of the shroud of melancholy and sombreness within which we drape our talk of death, it becomes just another thing that humans bumble our way through, with all the meanness, unthinking stupidity and (only occasionally) empathy that we bring to everything we do. This cheer-haran of the Grim Reaper, delivered in a foul-mouthed, boorish style that belies the incisive subtlety of Mehta’s writing, is Dark’s crowning achievement. The fact that it takes so long to get there, though, is its biggest weakness.

To really plumb the darkest depths of his mind, Mehta invents an alter-ego for Dark. The show starts with him—as Akash—on the stage filling us in on the life-story of his “twin brother” Prakash Mehta, his spiel intercut with vignettes of the latter’s pre-gig routine: drunkenly brushing his teeth with gin, pulling on a discarded cigarette butt that he picks up on the road, stalking his ex-wife on Instagram and breaking into ugly tears. 

Prakash, his brother tells us, was the kid who did what his parents wanted. He studied engineering, then got himself an MBA. He bagged a good job “selling hand-dryers for Godrej”, got married and had a kid. And then it all fell apart. His wife left him for his tax lawyer, he lost his job, his home and hit the bottle hard. He’s miserable, pathetic, aggressively vulgar, and a mean drunk. He reeks of curdled cynicism and bitter despair. Prakash is the sort of character who is steeped in darkness, not the magical, mystical darkness of good-and-evil fantasy but the grimy, run-down, very real result of bad luck and human failures. 

It’s a smart creative choice, allowing Mehta to embrace his Jungian shadow. Freed from the need to be likeable, he can drop the constant winking to the audience that comedians usually have to do, signalling that under the twisted punchlines there’s still a nice, progressive person. You don’t have to root for this guy. You shouldn’t even want to. Though it’s a testament to Mehta’s charm and talent as a performer that—if only in moments—you find yourself doing so anyway. 

The special is divided into four sections, though three of these are characterised as “disclaimers” ahead of the final bit that’s notionally “the show”. These are: we are not “good people”; we live in a time of looking good rather than being good; we will all die, and death can come anytime. These statements become launching pads for joyfully crass riffs on leprous beggars, interoffice revenge porn and 20-rupee-handjobs. 

Mehta has always been a key observer of human behaviour, and he puts those skills to good use as he hacks away at notions of our own ‘inherent goodness’. He regularly wrong-foots the audience with depraved punch-lines from left-field, wringing humour out of the macabre, the physically gross, and the just plain mean, though he’s never outright hateful. The first hour—which covers the first two ‘disclaimers’—is full of long “oh no he didn’t” anecdotes, punctuated by perspective-shifting twists that hint at an incisive intellect behind Prakash’s crusty, gin-sozzled, loserness. 

An extended bit about blind cricket, with groan-inducing “dekho” puns and jabs at the “differently-abled” terminology, ends with the brilliant “Main madarchod hoon? The organisers of the blind cricket world cup are called I-C-C!” Another story—about him getting fired for pulling a Louis CK (aka rubbing one out non-consensually) when he walks into his office to find his boss having sex with the secretary—has Prakash going on and on about the unfairness that he was the only one who was let go, before saying “maine kuch galat toh nahin kiya… Theek hai, unka video office group mein nahin daalna chahiye tha.” 

These are all great bits. But too often—for the first hour, at least—there’s a sense that Mehta is holding back. There’s a whiff of prelude to it, a too-slow ramp-up to the heart of darkness. Perhaps it’s the fact that jokes about influencers, woke terminology and porn-as-feminism may be a little subversive within our Bandra-South Delhi-Indiranagar bubbles, but they’re not particularly risky when you could find a thousand drunk uncles in a thousand middle-class living rooms saying the same things (though with none of the tact, wit and insight).

If you’re someone who thinks comedy should have something to say, some sort of social or cultural critique embedded in the jokes, you’ll find plenty of acutely observed “statements” in Dark.

I suspect that, given we live in a country where comedians can be assaulted and go to jail for jokes they haven’t even cracked yet, there was a bunch of more adventurous material that didn’t make the cut (Mehta told DeadAnt in an interview that four hours of more topical footage had to be left on the editing room floor). Whatever the reason, the first half of the special suffers for it, though it’s still pretty enjoyable. It’s the comedic equivalent of sidling up to the edge in order to take a selfie for Instagram, as opposed to taking a running leap off it. 

But when that leap finally comes—with the mortality-focused disclaimer #3—it’s absolutely worth the wait. Prakash talks about seeing his 90-something nana in the ICU, and the depressing reality of the ICU waiting room, where the only good news is that the patient has died. He rants with real venom about the indignities that come with a failing body, and describes with theatrical panache the desperation of a mother outside the operating room where her teenage son is fighting for his life. 

And just when you think that this total asshole is showing a moment of true vulnerability, that empathy—which he calls a disease you can catch via eye-contact—still has a place in his heart, he pulls the rug out from under you. Mehta is such a masterful manipulator that even when you know the rug-pull is coming, because it’s already happened a few times, you still land on your ass. And so you find yourself laughing uncontrollably at a teenager’s death on the operating table, or the drunken desecration of a funeral pyre. 

If you’re someone who thinks comedy should have something to say, some sort of social or cultural critique embedded in the jokes, you’ll find plenty of acutely observed “statements” in Dark. There’s hard-hitting commentary on the existence of marital rape, on human greed, on the hypocrisy of our perfectly curated online selves. But that isn’t really the point. This isn’t that sort of comedy special. Those are just a bonus, side-quests on Mehta’s epic mission to see how depraved he can get, how many taboos he can break—and family members he can debase—in order to get a laugh.

The answer, exemplified by a 20-minute-long closer about the Jack Daniels-soaked death of Mehta’s “druncle” and the beach-side cremation that follows, is that he’ll go as far as his imagination (and the Indian judicial system) will let him. That commitment, as much as Mehta’s inventive writing and impeccable comic timing, are what make Dark such a rousing—if uneven and over-long—triumph.