It was the night of Nitin Mirani.
On Saturday October 17, Dubai Comedy Festival’s Desi Invasion (at Skydive Dubai) saw some of India’s top stand-up comics – Atul Khatri, Kenny Sebastian, Neeti Palta and Abish Mathew – fly down to the UAE to entertain a large audience for two full hours, but host Mirani stole the show.
The Dubai-based comedian proved why he is ranked no less than fourth in the world: he is fearless and his timing is impeccable. Every time he took the stage between the other talents, he had the audience doubling up and gasping for breath. Some of them, like me, fell out of their chairs from laughing too hard.
But we picked ourselves up, dusted our clothes down and took our seats again, afraid to miss any of his jokes – nearly all of them unprintable, sadly. He took on Bollywood’s Bachchan family (“I don’t like Jaya Bachchan, say what you like, can’t tell if she’s crying or laughing”), the difference between men and women (“men are like dogs, when they come home from work, let them sit”); and Sindhis, an Indian community known for being careful with money (“that’s you guys in the complimentary seats”).
Not that the other acts fell short.
Kenny Sebastian was as charming as ever with his guitar and gift for singing impromptu songs about random people in the audience. Atul “old man” Khatri did what does best, taking his age – he is 47 years old, far older than his contemporaries – and turning it around to dish out razor-sharp observations about middle age, marriage and sex. Abish Mathew lampooned fellow Malayalis and their “middle-class preoccupation with fish tanks”. And “Punjabi kudi (girl)” Neeti Palta brought a fresh breath of air with her satire on India’s hypocritical attitude towards sex and women (“Someone posted the comment ‘You’re not funny, stay home and have babies’ on one of my YouTube videos. Why couldn’t you have just said that to me at home, mom?”).
But the best part of the night was the finale. Mirani pulled out a ring and asked his shocked girlfriend in the audience to marry him. She choked out a “yes”, the entire audience let out a collective “aww”, and Sebastian suddenly appeared on stage with his trusty guitar, making moony eyes at the newly engaged couple and singing an outrageously soppy Bollywood song.
The end. Until the next Desi Invasion, that is. Because “dil maange more”.
ciyer@thenational.ae
