2024 Show
Raditya Dika · Indonesia · Indonesian
A modest comedy series that's light on laughs but built on sturdy foundations
As is oddly common for TV shows revolving around stand-up comedy, the actual jokes in Comedy Chaos are mostly duds—or in this case, may have been greatly lost in translation from the original Indonesian. But while the show’s humor is only ever mildly amusing at best, it opens with a pretty compelling set-up: a protagonist fired for speaking up for labor rights, a marriage that has its miscommunications but remains firm, and characters who are all constantly plagued by money problems. So there’s a relatability to Comedy Chaos that keeps it intact, and it’s refreshing to see this series resist the usual cliched conflicts you’d expect to see early on.
After getting kicked out of his own company, a hapless man must juggle his delicate marriage and his struggling comedy club.
Panca buys his friend's struggling comedy club as a desperate move to secure his and his wife's future after he loses his job.
The central relationship between Panca and his wife Loli could've been like any other sitcom marriage—played mostly as a joke between the obliviously insensitive husband and a wife portrayed as a nag. But it's nice to see how these two characters actually do have trust in each other, even if they still have their own insecurities and assumptions about one another. Neither one comes off like a pushover to the other. And whenever it feels like the show is about to put them at odds just for the sake of drama, it reels things back and reminds us that these people are mature adults too.
Learning that Indonesians and Filipinos share the same words for "pay" and "debt" has thrown me into a linguistics rabbit hole I wasn't expecting.
Emil Hofileña is a curator at A Good Movie to Watch. He also writes as a theater critic, with work published in Rogue and Out of Print, among others. He’s probably crying over a movie or an episode as we speak.
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