When sketch comedians transition into conversational humour, it is tricky. While both are loosely speaking, lodged under the genre of “comedy," the muscles required are different — a density in sketch comics that is more diffused in conversational humour; a spontaneity in conversing that is, by design, plotted in sketch comedy; and an intrusive empathy in trying to mine humour from your guest that is more introspective while creating mimes.
Lilly Singh, a Candian-Indian whose Indian-Canadian humour strikes charm, is one of the best sketch comics around, role-playing both her parents — the iron-fisted mother, and the couldn’t-care-less father, both technologically challenged, and conservative but also confused, about the new world with its hazy norms and negotiable thresholds they find their daughter participating and thriving in. The mother is always decked in salwar-kameez, the father always in loose collared t-shirts, with a painted beard, chest hair peeking through — dull hues that make their colourful, sharply accented insults all the more jarring.
Starting her YouTube channel in 2010, by the time she got the A Little Late With Lilly Singh talk-show gig in 2019, she had amassed about 14 million subscribers on her own personal channel — clocking in over 3 billion views. Her distinct use of AAVE (African American Vernacular English), and her appropriation of black cultural artefacts, were constant sources of cultural critique that she never really incorporated through her career. Almost as if it were part of not just her persona, but personality.
Nonetheless, her fame was already on the steady rise. A 2016 documentary film, A Trip to Unicorn Island, followed her worldwide comedy tour, becoming one of the first YouTube Originals. That was also the year she interviewed Michele Obama. Her 2017 book, How to Be a Bawse: A Guide to Conquering Life, was a New York Times bestseller. In India, pirated copies were being sold on footpaths, certainly a sure sign of success. She even began her own production company, Unicorn Island Productions, with Polly Auritt, which produced her talk-show.
A Little Late With Lilly Singh debuted in September 2019, making Lilly Singh the first person of Indian and South Asian descent to host a major network late-night talk show. (Wanda Sykes and Mo’Nique were the only other women of colour talk show hosts before her) This was not a promotion as much as it was a wager. She was also the only woman with a late-night show on one of the “Big Four” broadcast networks at the time. She made the announcement on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, calling it “kind-of like my YouTube channel but now, I have more than three staff members, and my sound-guy won’t also be an extra, and won’t also write the script.”
The image of her between Seth Myers and Jimmy Fallon, two white men, was both a promise and provocation.
The promotional poster for A Little Late With Lilly Singh had her sneaker-cloaked legs on the table while casually holding a giant hammer, cracks in the wall behind. The sub-head “Breaking The Norm." like the image between Myers and Fallon, was also both a promise and a provocation. What The New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum said for comedian and late night talk show host Stephen Colbert rung true for Lilly Singh, “If anyone can jolt a genre that feels near-paralysed, [s]he’s the [girl].” Having a sketch-comedian become a professional conversationalist was indeed to short-circuit the Late Night Talk Show format.
The questions about what she would bring to the Late Night Talk Show aesthetic were squashed when the set was unveiled. There were not any radical changes apart from the striking colours. But this too paled in comparison to the glamorous openness of Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act. She had toyed with the idea of getting rid of the desk altogether, but kept it anyway. Questions of radical politics too were answered with a resounding, apolitical 'No.' Instead she decided to speak about marijuana and sex education.
The first season, while matching the ratings of Last Call With Carson Daily, which she replaced — averaging about 670,000 nightly viewers — was not exactly what we hoped. Her initial monologues paraded her identity — a Bisexual South Asian Woman — with a redolent pride that sometimes seemed excessive, only because it never leant itself to humour, or propped itself with greater, grander meaning, with the same ease with which it was brought up. (She made a joke about using the turban as a towel, and apologised after the backlash.) After a point, it felt like she was resting on her laurels.
It was only after the show was renewed for a second season, amidst the pandemic regulations, that she electrified the format and the form. This face-lifted second season really worked. Lilly’s capacity to prod with love and excessive hype felt odd with a jutting table between her guest and her. This season however, her team rented a house in Los Angeles where they shot the entirety of the second season, most guests coming via Zoom while she sat comfortable on her couch with more baggy, snazzy clothing, opposed to the body-hugging suits of the first season. The fluid camera would move around the house showing us what the back-stage looked like, with masked assistants, snake-pit of wires, and the lovely chaos. Sometimes, she folded her legs criss-cross, sometimes had them wide open, sometimes lounged, sometimes propped, leaning over, towards her guest as if about to kiss them.
But it was with the celebrities who visited the house in person — Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Jay Shetty, Hasan Minhaj — that we really saw what Lilly is capable of as an interviewer — a kind of radical intimacy, almost familial. Minhaj felt like a taunting brother, Ramakrishnan felt like a protected younger sister, she beckoned at Priyanka Chopra Jonas over Zoom, calling her “didi” without explaining its meaning or significance — that it does not just connote sisterhood, but also respect.
Sometimes this felt icky, but well-intentioned. When she spoke with Tan France over Zoom, they were riffing Hindi movie names without explaining their context or content. France, who will be welcoming a baby boy soon with his partner, was clear that he was going to school his kid in the Bollywood aesthetic of Khoon Bhari Maang. No explanation needed for who and what Rekha in the film represented.
The second season was also radical in its approach to guests — who usually come into Late Night shows to promote themselves or their cultural products. This time, Singh brought in guests who debuted on Late Night, like Alok Vaid Menon, the incredibly articulate gender non-conforming performance artist and writer, or “off-season” guests like Ramakrishnan, who debuted with Never Have I Ever, now up for a second season. As Singh noted in her last monologue before she bade farewell, 21 of the 80 episodes of the second season had someone making their Late Night debut. This is no small feat.
But the truth is also that her sketches, her “rants," while funny, definitely funnier than the conversions, did not have the kind of cultural impact it needed. Her swerve towards politics in the second season — discussing the Farmers' Protests, Defund The Police, and even immigration reform — did not nearly buoy the conversation the way Minhaj and Trevor Noah’s political monologues and break-downs did.
The show had a 1.5 rating on IMDb, compared with the 6.5 of Late Night With Seth Myera and 7.2 of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. With this in mind, and perhaps other commercial prerogatives, A Little Late With Lilly Singh was not renewed for a third season. Neither Singh nor NBC are calling this a cancellation, but that is essentially what it is. Singh will continue working with NBCUniversal. She is developing unscripted content, while also developing a comedy series with Black-ish creator Kenya Barris for Netflix. This is certainly not a death knell for her prodigious career.
Even so, one must ask, are two seasons enough to find one’s footing as a talk show host? In the old system it certainly was not. Up until 2017, Stephen Colbert’s talk show was on life support, and yet it continued till he found fame by milking Trump’s low hanging fruit for juicy jokes.
The truth is, this was huge, and when huge things end, that is huge too. When Kaling, the first guest on Lilly Singh’s show came on, she noted, “I can’t wait for my daughter to watch the show 20 years from now, when you’re still doing it and wishing you didn’t have to.” That hope is now cut short, but not the hope of minorities breaking into the area — the time-slot has been given to Amber Ruffin, a Black woman whose deadpan humour and political potshots are comedic granite.
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/a-little-late-with-lilly-singh-wraps-up-after-two-seasons-nbc-talk-show-was-a-historic-but-diminished-promise-9690751.html
