Review: ‘On Air With AIB’ Is Not a Roast but It’s Got Meat

A review of AIB’s new show on the Star network ‘On Air With AIB’

The All India Backchod gang lose some spunk but still pack quite a punch

After their ribald podcasts, outrageously funny sketches and the infamous Roast, ‘All India Bakchod’, which broke out and zoomed up the popularity charts on the desi online scene, landed its first broadcast show on the Star network - On Air With AIB. Here’s what we thought of it.

The Show

Rohan Joshi and Ashish Shakya on the show

<p><i>On Air With AIB</i> had pretty decent self-deprecating promos and we knew that the group wouldn’t be able to venture into their trademark no-holds barred rude humour, since the show was to be aired on the Star Network channels as well.</p>

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As the show’s signature track declared, the idea is about finding “tragedy mein comedy”. We’ve seen Cyrus Broacha spoofing the news in The Week That Wasn’t and there are several similar spin-offs on YouTube as well. The AIB show follows the same idea, but the format is different. On Air With AIB zeroed in on the topic of corruption and whistleblowers in episode one. The group split up for this, while Rohan Joshi and Ashish Shakya hosted the English version, Tanmay Bhat and Gursimran Khamba presented the Hindi one.

What Worked

All the humour is packaged to make you swallow the bitter pill

“You remember corruption? It’s that thing you used to care about before beef”, slips in Rohan Joshi at the very start and like most of the show, it works. The smart lines, the jokes on Rahul Gandhi, Robert Vadra, Chandrachur Singh and Ashok Khemka - all hit home. All the humour is packaged to make you swallow the bitter pill - the politics around the Whistleblower Protection Act, the pathetic protection provided to Vypam scam whistleblower Ashish Chaturvedi, the absurd arrest of Tarakant Dwivedi and so on.

<p>Let’s admit it, this generation will not be picking up a P Sainath book and though at one level it’s pretty blasphemous to compare the two, for the digital age, shows like <i>On Air With AIB</i>, will hopefully be able to evolve into a much lighter, cotton candy version of what books like, <i>Everybody Loves a Good Drought</i> sought to do – inform, provoke and question.</p>

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The second half of the show, around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blaming Palestine for the Holocaust, was tame. But the best part came at the end – Abish Mathew’s interview of Dr K Padmarajan, a record holder for losing the maximum number of elections (171 so far), was cheeky and it finally took us out of the dull studio set.

What Didn’t Work

Tanmay and Khamba seemed to struggle a bit with the Hindi version, but that’s ok

What didn’t work for me was that the show was too verbose. You almost wanted to ask the guys to take a break and hand them a glass of water. Tanmay and Khamba seemed to struggle a bit with the Hindi version, but that’s ok, I’m sure that’ll be ironed out as they get used to it.

<p>The studio setting along with the constant commentary tends to get monotonous despite the punch lines. If there are no guests on the show, what it needs is more video inserts, like Prakash Raj’s RTI spoof, which was a welcome relief.</p>

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On AIR With AIB is off to a promising start, though I doubt it will gain a similar fan following as their YouTube videos do. That of course also depends on how far they are willing to offend, enrage and engage, given the limitations of running a TV show, it seems a tad impossible.

(You can connect with Suresh Mathew on Twitter @Suresh_Mathew_)