Junior is very fond of jokes. A steady “diet” of Suppandi comics, in addition to Tinkle has only increased his appetite for jokes. He takes pride in remembering “kadi” jokes in English and cracks them at school. He claims that his classmates call him “jokester”, which could’ve probably be a self-anointed one!! From what I notice, he seems to pick the responses well and immediately identified those that doesn’t land. One day while out on a walk with him, he said something about dwindling insect population, and I was calmly listening. After a while he asked why I didn’t laugh!! I got confused and asked him why I should laugh for a fact. He then said, it was a joke on reducing number of insects and he has made it based on a scene from some cartoon! Then only I realized how serious he is in framing his own jokes! As usual I was droning on about how a joke is made basis my own understanding, which wasn’t convincing even for me. He was having a confused look on his face and asked how I’ve would made it into a joke. It was a question that truly stumped me for it made me realize, he is trying to impress me for he sees me as his source for some of the jokes! We were trying to produce some crazy ideas of how to twist a fact into a funny expression and after some futile attempts finally landed on one that was approved by Junior – What is common to Suppandi and Jelly fish? They both don’t have brains! While the fact that jelly fish doesn’t have brains (news to me) was provided by junior, I linked the Suppandi part to it which was approved by Junior. He went to his class and while returning he said, only a few people got the link as many were not aware that Jelly fishes doesn’t have brain! The rate at which he is going wonder if he would become a stand-up comedian soon! He doesn’t have the patience to drop the hook or for a grand reveal but for that the efforts are already there in producing original jokes. And it is quite impressive that he understands which of his jokes are funny and which doesn’t. The learning for me from this whole conversation was, how an information is perceived by any one and everyone. To become a good comedian or crack good jokes, one should improve their learning, widening their scope of study and look out for things that are unique and distinct, which can be converted into a funny message. Quite curious to see how long Junior will sustain this momentum though! Kudos to those kids who listen to his “kadi” jokes and appreciate rather than ridicule.
What makes a drama series tick, in OTT, that too in Tamil? The question should've been pretty straight forward and not as difficult as it is for making a successful movie, for drama series are dime a dozen across scores of TV channels and none of them are found wanting for audience. The more the cry the merrier the TRP. In that context, the only challenge that OTT platforms might've had while streaming tamil series must've been to choose the path - either the well trodden and worn out cryathons aligning with Satellite channels or try for something genre specific like how they do across English and other foreign languages. This is where Heartbeat series in Hotstar finds the fine balance between being a soap oppaari (no pun intended) in tv and carving a niche OTT audience. While the setup might've been familiar one for Hindi audience with so many series happening on hospital based storyline, i guess this is a first for tamil. The first season was more on establishing the...
Comments
Very healthy to have a large sense of humour. Junior shows every sign of besting his father.
I was about to message you that there had been a pause in your posts. I know how tough it is to keep this going, but your blog is a treasure and you are the only one who has kept the blog going for such a long time, while many of us, lazybones, have disappeared. And then this post popped up. Bravo.
By the way, who is Suppandi ?!