Anubhav Singh Bassi is having a dreamy 2023. Tu Jhooti Main Makkaar, his debut feature film alongside Ranbir Kapoor and Shraddha Kapoor, is slated to release on March 8. To add to it, his first stand-up special, Bas Kar Bassi, which premiered on Prime Video on Wednesday, is already topping the charts on the streaming platform.
But does popularity also mean quality? Sure, Bassi is a funny man. However, his brand of comedy is the garden-variety kind; he derives humour out of his real-life misadventures. It’s not one punchline after the other, or one joke following the next relentlessly, it’s more like an extroverted friend sharing a series of funny incidents whenever he can find an audience. You may know some of the stories already, but you still laugh, partly at the ridiculousness of what you’re hearing, and partly because the person narrating it is having such a good time doing it. How can you not? It’s infectious.
At 32, Bassi has made a stand-up career out of oversharing the stories from his time at NLU, Lucknow. Some of them actually make up for good material but one can hear college stories only so much. Thankfully, in Bas Kar Bassi, he moves beyond and talks about his early days of trying to make a living after college before he stumbled into stand-up comedy. He talks about it all—the insufferable Mumbai traffic, the joke that is any attempt at trying to practice litigation in India, the bursting of the startup bubble, and the inanity of trying to run a fast-food outlet with friends.
At 83 minutes, Bas Kar Bassi begins strongly. Bassi manages to hold tight and pack a punch for the first 20 minutes when he delves into his time working at the Supreme Court and whatever little that he practised of law. It is when he starts with his experience with a startup that the material begins to sag. By the time he begins with his entrepreneurial journey, his stories become so absurd, you begin to question it all.
The disclaimer at the beginning informs you that the special—shot in Mumbai’s Royal Opera House on August 14 last year and directed by Abhishek Upmanyu—is unscripted. It shows. There is a beginning, somewhat of a middle, and no end. When it does finally come, it’s abrupt and unexpected. Some stories, which should have been edited out, go on and on. Meanwhile, others that he builds painstakingly crash all of a sudden. The special starts with someone asking Bassi his stage time at the cities he recently toured. We find out that all his shows lasted for over two hours. Is that a compliment, something to brag about? Or, at a time when even feature films have become cautious of their duration; is it just overconfident and silly? I don’t know.
Sure, a stand-up comic should be funny. But they should also have something to say. Is that too much of an ask? A special shouldn’t feel like a cousin sharing his buddy stories over drinks at a wedding afterparty. Bas Kar Bassi is just that. It chooses to be juvenile and slapstick when it could have been so much more. I was waiting for Bassi to talk about how he got into stand-up comedy. But he doesn’t. Maybe that’s a special for another day.
