Why Chelsea is the king and queen of American talk
Talk shows, over time, have evolved a formula: the announcer, the side kick, the introductory comic monologue, celebrity chat, skits, a house band and live music. There are continental peculiarities: in the UK, the invited guest usually sits to the right of the host, in America she sits to the left.
In India, right now, we finally have a choice of talk shows to choose from. At 11pm three shows go head to head: there's Jimmy Kimmel on Star World, Stephen Colbert on Star Premiere HD and Jimmy Fallon on Comedy Central. Netflix offers Chelsea Handler, while Amazon Prime is streaming The Late Late Show with James Corden.
There are more options at non-late timings: Ellen Degenres is on Romedy, while Comedy Central has Graham Norton in his 21st season.
An Indian viewer, trying to follow Jay Leno in earlier times, would run into an obstacle. I'd watch an episode out of curiosity but could never get hooked. We would often find ourselves stumped by local references, crucial to "getting" humour. One didn't recognise all the actors, the political references passed one by.
American culture and politics is now available 24x7, on the internet and on television. We know more about American politics than ever before. TV shows are broadcast here on cable simultaneously or 12 hours after the US telecast.
Netflix will debut a new show internationally on a Tuesday, the New Yorker will write about it on Thursday, by Friday one of the actors of the show will turn up on Jimmy Kimmel. Since we have access to content, we have access to the context, and so we get the one-liners. America is not such a strange land anymore.
In America, the talk show is a comment on the day's happenings, so the late night slot. As an Indian, it took me some time to get used to watching so many excited shiny people buzzing around as if they had had 20 Red Bulls - at my bedtime.
I like falling asleep to the soothing sounds of the BBC newsreader. It seemed to be the Americans had got the timing wrong. I now consume Chelsea with my morning cereal. It's the difference between a late night covefe and a morning covefe - one will leave you wide awake, the other will be a like a springboard to your day.
Every talk show host has his/her own style: the camp humour of Graham Norton contrasts with the drollness of Jimmy Kimmel is different from the doling-out-gifts-to-the audience joy-de-vivre of Ellen DeGeneres. Fallon is enthusiastic and dopy at the same time, with a touch of fratboy humour.
Colbert mauls Trump, night after night, and is only too thrilled when Trump tweets: But who the hell is Colbert? Don't miss Colbert's favourite prop - his pencil, which he sometimes chews, sometimes drops on his desk - but no matter how many pencils he drops he is miraculously always holding one twixt his fingers.
In the world of male talk show hosts, Chelsea Handler is nothing short of a revolution.
While the male hosts wear suits, Chelsea is known for wearing unisex rock t-shirts; the Who, the Stones, Depeche Mode, The Go-Go's. Others hide their personal lives (Kimmel broke the rule only once when his newborn turned out to have a hole in the heart), Chelsea puts it right in your nose.
Chelsea can be rude to guests, uses the f-word liberally, is unabashedly feminist but has crossover international appeal, which is why she's on Neflix and not an American network.
While others shows have a stiff set design, Chelsea's pet dog is all over her set, sometimes even taking a poop. A global 40-something, single audience connects with her because Chelsea has made being 40 and single a central part of her show.
She talks openly about smoking pot, drinking too much and popping Xanax on sleepless nights. When people open out their lives to you, you let them into your own life a little bit more.
You watch Chelsea because of Chelsea and not because of the stock celebrity guests who will appear on it on the conveyer belt of publicity and promotion.
What one gets on Chelsea is not sanitised speech but the way we speak normally, and when she uses "pussy" or "masturbation" or cracks a "boob joke", in the normal course of conversation, there is nothing to be offended by.
Chelsea projects an image, which is smart, sexy, gutsy, fun-obnoxious, and very American and yet appealing to an international English-speaking generation, united by universal progressive values.
She's capable of course correction. After Trump's defeat she said, "Thank god, at least we have pot"; but when a glaring flaw in the Democrat campaign was pointed out - that they'd been blind to the concerns of the Rust Belt, she admitted: "What would I know sitting in my Hollywood bubble?" Her show went out and talked to those people.
The jokes on Chelsea are not dumbed down memes but weird wild unsentimental open-ended fragments of wisdom that sometimes take time to sink in. Chelsea is a force of nature - and the human race is the better for it.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)