Out Of Sheer Boredom, I Watched Ladies Up On Netflix And It Was Terribly Boring

Most of us have settled into a new routine. A routine that involves waking up, actually sitting and having breakfast with family and then logging into the laptop to ensure that you boss knows you are not twiddling your thumbs but actually working from home. As the managing editor of Hauterfly, I sometimes have to sit around waiting for the writers in the team to bung out their articles and because I am not at work, it is during these times, that I allow myself to wander over to Netflix.

After watching a lot of stuff on the OTT platform – mainly reruns of Friends – I realised I should broaden my horizons. Expand my list, if you will. And so, I scrolled along, stopping briefly at what Netflix recommended to me. I avoided the food shows because, well, they make me hungry and we’ve been looking for chocolates in the past few days, so yeah, desserts are not happening. I also steered clear of the serial killer shows I normally tend to hurtle towards – it’s too dark for these times.

And so, as I slid down on my bed further, I came across Ladies Up. It’s a stand up show with 4 Indian female comics performing. It was a great premise- I like women, I like comedy- this was going to be entertaining. And these women are Indian, so I would be able to relate. With that, I started to watch.

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Except that I should have gone with any other show. Any at all. It’s very rare that you have to tell consider yourself lucky that each set is only 15 minutes. Because even that is 15 minutes too long. Don’t get me wrong – the women are fantastic. If you’ve watched them outside of this, these women are fuck funny. But here, something doesn’t work. It doesn’t click.

The jokes seem stilted, the audience doesn’t laugh, mainly because it doesn’t come across as spectacularly funny. Prashasti Singh comes on first, talks about her dating life and sex life. But it doesn’t manage to hold your interest. She even talks about her mom and Facebook and this should be comic gold but instead the joke best finishes with a tepid bronze. Her awkward sexual encounter was, well, so uneventful and uninteresting that I couldn’t invest emotions in it even if I tried.

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Then, Kaneez Surka came on. She’s a comedy veteran. And man oh man, she’s funny. I don’t know even know what happened here. Let’s hand it to her, The buildup is always funny. But then, when the jokes have to land, they kind of just roll off. Not like haha funny, but more like a hehe. And everyone knows that a hehe is just you staring stoically at your phone. And Kaneez was the funniest one of them all. Yeah, it got worse.

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Then it was Supriya Joshi and at this point, I had run out of all fucks. And I think the audience had also run out of them, because she barely managed a chuckle out of them. She talked about revenge bods and dead boring Malad jokes which should have died many years ago. She also made comments about flavoured condoms. All in all, nothing worth spilling your coffee over.

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Niveditha Prakasam is up next and she’s the one I really wanted to watch. This woman is wicked and dark. And yet, none of it flew. I don’t know if it was the audience or the Tamil tropes she was talking about, but none of us could relate.

Overall, Ladies Up is a hard pass. This could have been so much more but it didn’t even try.

https://thehauterfly.com/lifestyle/three-grandmothers-who-have-been-bffs-for-40-years-moved-in-together-to-binge-on-netflix-and-wine-while-in-quarantine-we-want-in-too/