Rahul Talks to Peopleis a new crowd work special featuring stand-up comedian Rahul Subramanian, in a spree of multiple unscripted and direct interactions with the audience members. The special is directed by Biswa Kalyan Rath and has a total runtime of 52 minutes and is based out of Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Chennai.
Before I watched the show, I had read a couple of reviews that spoke about how amazing the show was and it was based out of multiple cities in India including Kolkata where I grew up so I was excited to see what he had to offer. Subramaniun is funny, BUT, the big but, he’s too slow and it’s kinda boring. The show’s format was in a video game where he moved from city to city and the little character like in a Mario game also moved and acted as the intro to each section. I did not understand why there were two Banglore sessions that were firstly separated but also put with just Chennai in the middle, the flow of the show was non-existent. By the time we settled down into one plot and got invested, we had to switch cities. The sections were completely random (which was the point of the crowd work) but they did not complement each other or make sense in a larger picture.
He’s funny in the way an annoying brother of uncle is, picks every small detail and creates a fuss about it and apparently it becomes funny. He made very few good jokes and his structure was often oh someone is going to say a story, I’m not going to let them speak and keep interuptting them so that I can create some small fussy situation about it. It wasnt the improv where he hear an audeince member complete a story they were saying which is firstly respectful and secondly it helps give the audience a clearer picture. In one of the stories, he would stop the person from talking at a line like ‘on Wednesday’s we had a local market set up’ and before the sentence could be over make fun of it. There is nothing funny in this, infact this monkey story itself was funnier than the dragged jokes that he made on it.
Now don’t get me wrong, you are going to smile and laugh because he is funny but would I exceptionally recomend it to a friend, never. Would I actively talk about how good it was? No. Was I disappointed? Yes. The audience apart from the Mumbai one were all super dry, not proactive and the applause in Kolkata felt sad. This may be a harsh review overlooking the good jokes but having seen Vir Das live and going for a Kenny Sebastian show tonight, I don’t think I would go for a Rahul Subramaniun show, let alone watch it online. Sometimes simple is good but calling a show ‘Rahul Talks To People’ just doesnt cut it for me.
