During the 2014 Fringe, Tarun Mohanbhai put on a show called Time of My Life. Now, three years later, he returns to the Dunedin Fringe with Existential Gentrification of Tarun Mohanbhai and to be perfectly honest, not a whole lot has changed. Enough material from Time of My Life finds its way into Existential Gentrification, to make it feel as though the latter could be merely an updated rebranding of the former.

Both adhere to the same basic structure, using a loose retelling of Mohanbhai’s life as a way of linking together his various jokes and anecdotes, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. Indeed, sticking to the same formula in order to refine it over many iterations is commendable and, as I understand it, often the way stand-up is developed. What is shocking to me is that this doesn’t seem to have happened here.

For example, the stories Mohanbhai tells about his childhood are largely the same between the two shows, but while Time of My Life carried on into adulthood to talk about Mohanbhai’s love life and career roots giving the show a sense of narrative cohesion and flow, Existential Gentrification opts instead to completely fall to pieces.

The second half of the show consists of so much ‘umm’ing, ‘err’ing and other stalling until another joke is pulled seemingly at random from the air and unceremoniously hurled at the audience only to fall flat leaving a flustered Mohanbhai to begin the cycle anew. And this is the final, fatal straw. Mohanbhai’s sheer unpreparedness would not be acceptable in an improv show, and in a stand-up routine with this much reused material it’s frankly mystifying.

On many occasions during his set he pulls out a printed script and assures his audience he has a joke for them if he could only remember where it was. While he assures us that this is all the result of the show being new and that he will soon have it finely polished, the whole charade is yet more deja vu for anyone who saw Time of My Life. Fool me once, Mr Mohanbhai. 

In the interest of fairness, I should point out that some of his jokes are funny, but unfortunately the laughs are few and far between. Ultimately, if you haven’t seen Mohanbhai before you are in for an exercise in tedium and lukewarm delivery punctuated by the odd moment of amusement, and if you have seen him before you’re in for pretty much the same only you’ve also heard some of the jokes before. 

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