Aditya Mani Jha - Deadant
20 Jan 2023
For a standup special named The Cynic, Romesh Ranganathan sure squeezes in a lot of unironically sweet moments. You’d think that this show is about (perfectly warranted) cynicism at the usual targets—politicians, corporations, online grifters of various kinds. But The Cynic is actually about something else entirely. It’s about the cynicism one feels regarding one’s friends, one’s family. It’s the kind of cynicism that’s often indistinguishable from long-suffering love. You know your mother will never stop critiquing your haircut or your job (or your choice of partner). You know your childhood friends will never stop calling you by that one nickname you hate with a fiery passion. These are dependable facts, axiomatic even. And they’ve made you what you are: a homegrown cynic. You’re the old man yelling and shaking his fists at the kids on his porch—only, they’re your kids.
Take Ranganathan’s pandemic jokes, for example. A gifted mime, he imitates his wife trying hard not to lose her temper at him during the lockdowns. “We realised that all these years we were not talking, it was more like we were reporting our whereabouts—and now suddenly, there were no more locations to report.” This leads into a passage of truly dark humour, where Ranganathan makes a daring connection between staring at the blank page as a writer, and struggling to make domesticity work.
“You must have had this. Looking at your other half, trying to pretend their breathing’s not getting on your fucking tits. Just staring at them, (mimes) ‘What have I got left to say to you?’ Just desperately going to other rooms and hoping to get some new material. ‘Maybe if I go to the bathroom the sink will make a funny noise I can do an impression of when I come back.’ Just tragic. Desperate.”
Ranganathan’s craft is rock-solid, and he is very good at the basics of standup—crowd work, thematic riffs, stitching together smaller jokes that lead up to something big. I loved his extended riff on the para-social relationships we often have with celebrities. He jokes about a “power imbalance” in his marriage because while he was soundly scolded for finding Emilia Clarke hot in Game of Thrones, his wife can loudly and regularly thirst for Idris Elba (“I just want him to rail me in that tweed coat”) while the couple is watching Luther. Things come to a head after Ranganathan and his wife actually meet Elba at an awards show.
“It wasn’t even like I had to look at the two of them and stew and think, ‘I wonder what she’s thinking of doing to him’. I don’t have to wonder. I remember. I have heard this woman talk about doing disgusting, depraved things to this man. And now I have to sit next to him, feeling less attractive every moment while she laughs at the joke he’s just cracked.”
[Ranganathan] is more than willing to put himself in the firing line, and that’s always a good habit for a comic.
In less skilled hands, this routine could have come across as just another lazily-written wife-bashing routine. But with that last line, Ranganathan cleverly connects everything to our (necessarily contrived) ideas of attractiveness. And his delivery is just so earnest and believable. This also holds him in good stead when he’s wading through darker stuff, like a routine about the time he lost track of one of his kids in a crowded public place.
“After my kid went missing, everybody started looking like a nonce*. Every single person, just the spitting image of Prince Andrew.”
(*‘nonce’ is British slang for a sexual offender, including and especially a paedophile.)
That’s a solid if deathly bleak joke, and it sets the tone for what’s to follow—just about everybody mentioned in the routine is thoroughly humiliated, none more so than Ranganathan himself. He is more than willing to put himself in the firing line, and that’s always a good habit for a comic.
The most interesting and ultimately most enjoyable part about The Cynic, however, is the 40-minute bonus episode that follows the 60 minutes of standup. This is a behind-the-scenes feature that sees Ranganathan explaining to his family what he’s doing with Netflix, and that they’re shooting the special in his hometown of Crawley. I have long wished to see the family members of a comedian react to the work, and to the fact of being writerly subjects.
This bonus features delivers that, and more. Ranganathan’s mother Shanthi (who steals the show here) ‘interviews’ him on a stage that resembles a talk show set—and then promptly scolds him for slouching. His children gleefully inform Ranganathan that they’re going to perform on the same stage a week beforehand, in the same theatre Netflix has chosen. And the kids’ show (“just a bit of singing, a bit of acting”, as his elder son informs him) has sold out before Ranganathan’s. Elsewhere, the comedian and his brother Charlie talk to Shanthi about their upbringing, on occasion mimicking her thick Sri Lankan accent.
All of this is very wholesome and in fact adds up to a kind of deconstructed family comedy, as though Ranganathan were blowing up the sitcom template and constructing something new and eccentric with the debris. For this and for several other reasons, The Cynic is highly recommended. Come for the standup, stay for the meta-hijinks.