Vir Das' Unbelievable: The Dishonest Indian

The gambit in Vir Das's show is that if the audience thinks he's lying, he turns the microphone to them and allows them to shout "true" or "false" accordingly. Unfortunately that's only an option made available for the anecdotes, not the countless times he spouts ill-researched prejudices about seemingly every culture on earth.

As an Indian film star, he's a huge name on the subcontinent, and he's adopted an aggressively populist western style to match it. There are obvious parallels to be made between Bollywood cinema borrowing a few conventions from Hollywood, and Das seemingly copying every American comic he's seen. He's got the stage presence and polished persona you'd expect from an established celebrity, but the parroted result is like a less subtle (and more offensive) Dane Cook.

The cultural quirks that Das takes to be universal truths are mostly concerned with Indian living, but he's got plenty of other "observations" to peddle. Generally the material is spectacularly misjudged, as he shoehorns ethnic identities into the most rigid of world views. He even takes the time to goad the predominantly Indian audience into collectively sneering at a lone Pakistani man in the front row. There's nothing in the way of nuance or intellectual finesse here, it's just an endlessly obtuse bulldozing of diplomacy without any of the artistic merit to justify it.

That's the crux of the show's failure: you can get away with willful ignorance if the material serves a greater creative goal; but here it just comes off as timeworn comedy informed by timeworn perspectives.