Chunkey Pandey shares his experience on anchoring Laugh India Laugh

The adage of all dressed up and nowhere to go seems to be the perfect saying to describe the fate of Life OK’s stand -up comedy show Laugh India Laugh. We are not saying so, but the rating of this Chunkey Pandey, Shekhar Suman and Mika (he is on and off) judged effort seem to indicate the same (0.8TVR).

Compare this to what Sony Entertainment Television Comedy Circus’ 3.3 rating and the writing is clearly on the wall.

Chunkey, now better known as Aakhiri Pasta (Housefull movie series) attributes these lower numbers to two major reasons, “Firstly, a lot many people check out Laugh India Laugh during the myriad repeats that the channel keeps airing and secondly that there was no promotion, no hoarding before the launch of the show. One fine day (18 July) they just launched a new show called Laugh India Laugh. But I guess that was the way the channel had planned and they have succeeded in a way as the popularity of the show has increased over the weeks.”

Chunkey’s hurt could be felt when he lamented that Laugh India Laugh could not be as successful as Devon Ke Dev… Mahadev that airs on the same channel and had a superb rating of 8.2 last week. Coming to the contestants of his show, he says,“ I salute these guys from both India and Pakistan for I know that doing comedy acting in films is a cake walk compared to what these stand-up guys do. They have just have ten minutes to work on their scripts. I have had great fun judging this show and the talent on display was awesome. People say I laugh too much, but I can’t help it. The bar will really go up as we head towards the finale.”

Here he adds, “We also tried out several unique things. i.e. after starting on a daily format, we moved to a weekend slotting. Also getting rid of the female anchor and asking celebs guests to anchor were all attempts to be a different form of competition”