Kanan Gill’s Yours Sincerely Is A Dull Affair Save For Few Laughs

Note: The review may contain spoilers

“In India we don’t do small talk. We only do big talk” - as Kanan Gill begins his new Netflix special, Yours Sincerely (streaming from 24 April), with how ‘silent’ airports in our country are a big joke and how aunties dive straight into our salaries without bothering about minute-long pleasantries as is done abroad, I was hoping beyond hope it wouldn’t go the Vir Das’ For India way.

Thankfully, it didn’t.

Rather, Kanan adopts a more personal route - he takes most of us back to our childhood days, when we would write silly letters to our older selves, be part of family dramas, bet our lives on Grand Theft Auto, call up our crushes from landlines (yes, they were very much a part of this Earth) and gobble paragraphs from textbooks because ‘learn by heart’ is sacred to the educational system.

After launching into a hilarious monologue about formal and informal letters that we believed would change our lives, only to find out that nobody cares whether the date is on the left or right, Kanan reads out his own…. letter. “I had written this to myself when I was 15, with a list of goals I had to accomplish by now”, the stand-up comedian says, and with each ‘goal’ he opens up about his life, insecurities and frustrations.

“The most important part of a formal letter is the subject”, says Kanan, and his younger self made sure that he remembers it till date despite goals having gone on another tangent. “These days, people have hydration goals”, a bemused Kanan says, elaborating on how his friend has downloaded an app on his iPhone that reminds him to drink water. That had me in splits during this sombre lockdown period because I immediately recalled a conversation with a friend who was convinced that this technological miracle is godsend for someone who NEVER drinks water.

Now, over to Gill’s supposed ambitions. The first one goes - “Focus on your health” - and through this Kanan speaks about his absence from shows for almost a year and apparent weight gain. “I was told I had a hernia. Where a portion of my intestine slipped into another section of my body. Now you see, I did not know organs could do that, just roam around where they wanted to,” he enacts his story, and all I did was roll my eyes.

Throughout the show Kanan alludes to metaphors to speak about the challenges of life. The funniest bit is his (and in turn our) obsession with Julius Caesar, a play whose lines some of us must have memorised so well at gunpoint that we can even recite those in our sleep.

Julius Caesar had the most literal ‘metaphor’ - Brutus backstabs his best friend by actually stabbing him in the back! Karan exclaims. He also stresses on the importance of ‘last words’ of one’s life, which can either be a total tragedy or be meat for poets and playwrights. Don’t let your final words be “Arre yaar”, tells Gill, adding they should rather be in a dead language like Sanskrit. “Something like Aham Gachhami, which literally means I am going”, will carve you a place among the immortals, and it instantly cracked me up.

Every ‘goal’ in the letter has a backstory, and as the minutes progress the jokes become increasingly unfunny. Sex, depression, the Indian ‘habits’, suicide, friendship goals, girlfriends - the done and dusted tropes of a stand-up resurface all over again, making the latter half of the show more preachy and less entertaining. I swear I didn’t imagine the intensity of the claps and laughs fading with time.

Most stand-up comics reserve the best joke for the end, but in this case the big laugh never comes. Rather than landing the perfect punch, Kanan signs off with a supremely dull conversation between him and his friend about how the letter is actually a ‘letterphor’ for a life bereft of achievements.

‘Yours Sincerely’ at the end of each letter written in school might have been just stray alphabets strung together for most of us, but about the show I can say with utmost sincerity - save for a few laughs and amusing theatrics, Kanan Gill fails to make a perfect comeback. In his words, the show is nothing but a ‘time pass’.