The Funny Indian Newsletter, Vol. 231

December 2025: The Last Newsletter

Dec 30, 2025

Welcome

Welcome to The Funny Indian Newsletter!

I went full-time into standup comedy in October 2006. That same month, we launched this newsletter. Nearly twenty years later, we* have decided December 2025 will be the final FunnyIndian Newsletter… the FINAL FINL.

*we = I

Many of you also receive my Gruntled Newsletter, which I launched in January 2025. That will carry the torch going forward. I’m subscribing you to it automatically—apologies if you don’t want it, but it’s far easier for you to unsubscribe than for me to individually ask all of you. I’ll continue to send a Funny Indian Newsletter occasionally when there’s meaningful news.

To be clear: I’m not retiring or anything. I’ll still emcee and perform standup. I stand by my claim that I’m the world’s best MC, and I expect that to remain a major part of my professional life for quite some time. After all, I* have a four-year-old to raise.

*I = we.

So why end this newsletter?

In short: I want to work during the day. Comedians are nocturnal. Speakers are diurnal.

But more broadly, my priorities have shifted.

There’s a Japanese concept called ikigai: your work sits at the intersection of what you’re good at, what you enjoy, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs. Standup still checks many of those boxes for me. But that last one? Let’s face it: you can now scroll through TikTok and Instagram and find nerdy Indian comedians. Moreover, I’ve come to realize that the work where I feel most useful—where I feel I’m contributing something meaningful and lasting—is in speaking, writing, and helping people think more clearly about happiness, leadership, and purpose.

Why now? All TV shows begin with what’s known as an “inciting incident.” Like, why did the show begin on this day and not yesterday or tomorrow? The initial firing of Jimmy Kimmel was the inciting incident for me. I have no delusions that I’m as big as Kimmel, but the cooling effect on creative people is real. If I don’t feel free to speak my mind, why not just embrace the corporate stuff? After all, I’ve stayed clean for 20 years. It’s an easy transition.

My literal voice is authorative. People listen to me when I speak in imperatives. But standup comics don’t speak in imperatives. Speakers do. The reality is that no standup comic right now is changing anyone’s minds (and they may even be doing more harm than good).

That’s not a rejection of comedy. It’s an evolution. In fact, something most of even my closest friends don’t know is that the very first job I ever wanted—long before standup—was to be a speaker. Comedy opened doors, sharpened my voice, and gave me a life I’m profoundly grateful for. Everything it brought me has been gravy.

To dive a bit deeper, I can see all the way to the end of my life: After my dad passed away in May 2024, my sense of time changed. I’m turning 50 in March. I’ll be 63 when Naveen graduates high school. If I’m lucky, I’ll have a couple of good decades after that. I’ve become more intentional about how and where I want to spend my energy.

Over the course of 2025, I also noticed something simple but telling: my best thinking happens in the shower, and I was spending far more of that time running through my Personal To Do List than my Professional one. My focus has shifted to my son, my wife, and my mom. “All he cares about is school and his mom and his friends.”

There’s also a natural tension between comedy and speaking. Comedy is about breaking things down. Speaking is about building things up. Failure is funny; success is not. Leadership, growth, and happiness have made me a better human being, husband, and father—but they’re not always compatible with the life of a full-tilt standup comic. Ironically, I moved to LA chasing professional success and ended up finding something far more valuable: personal success. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t make that trade.

So let me end by saying thank you. Truly. Some of you have been reading this newsletter for nearly two decades. That’s extraordinary. I’m grateful for your support, your encouragement, and the life this career has given me.

I’m not closing a door so much as walking more fully through another one. And I’m excited about what comes next.

Musings

ChatGPT generated this. Sharing just to show how far it’s come just this year… and why writers should be even more scared than they’re letting on.

Here was my prompt:

Help me write a ridiculously long message about the Bengals. Basically, “The problem with the Bengals today is scoring 0 points in the first half and then 0 points in the second half. What you want to do is avoid that.” But keep saying that over and over in different ways to make it funny. Don’t use literally the same words. Just be ridiculous.

Heres my take on the Bengals game today.

The problem is that they score zero points before halftime, and then—through an impressive commitment to symmetry—score zero points after halftime as well.

You see, football games are generally won by accumulating points. The Bengals, by contrast, have chosen a bold alternative strategy: participating for sixty minutes while never advancing the number on the scoreboard beyond zero.

In the opening half, when most teams are trying to establish rhythm, momentum, or at least mild optimism, the Bengals establish nothing. They enter the locker room having successfully prevented themselves from scoring, which they then treat not as a warning sign but as a mission statement.

The second half is where adjustments are supposed to happen. Instead, the Bengals make the courageous decision to adjust nothing and continue the proud tradition of not scoring. Consistency matters, and if there is one thing you can say for them, it is that they are unwaveringly consistent in their refusal to put points on the board.

Now, some might argue the first half is the issue. Others might say the second half is the issue. But this is a false debate. The real problem is the seamless collaboration between both halves to ensure that no points are scored at any time.

If you think about it, the Bengals aren’t just failing once—they are failing twice, independently, and then combining those failures into a complete, holistic experience of offensive emptiness.

They go into halftime with zero points, come out fired up, and then calmly proceed to still have zero points. That’s not collapse. That’s follow-through.

What you want, ideally, is to score at least some points either before or after halftime. The Bengals, however, have elected to score none in either segment, thereby maximizing the difficulty of winning a professional football game.

Every drive ends with a punt, a turnover, or a lingering sense of existential dread. The scoreboard remains untouched, like a museum exhibit no one is allowed to interact with.

The offense spends the entire game warming up for a game that never begins. By the fourth quarter, they are fully loose, fully prepared, and still fully scoreless.

Analysts will say things like “they just need to start faster” or “they need to finish stronger,” when really what they need is to start scoring and then continue scoring, rather than doing neither at any point.

You cannot expect to win many games when you treat both halves as optional scoring opportunities. The Bengals have taken the concept of “halves” too literally, using each one as its own self-contained zero-point masterpiece.

At some point, someone needs to explain that touchdowns and field goals are allowed in both halves, and in fact encouraged. There is no penalty for scoring early, late, or at all.

Because the issue is simple: if you score zero points in the first half and then follow that up by scoring zero points in the second half, the end result is a game in which you have scored zero points total. And that, historically, is not a winning formula.

So until the Bengals decide to disrupt this elegant pattern—until they choose to score literally any points at any time—this will continue to be the problem. Not coaching. Not scheme. Not vibes.

Just sixty minutes of football carefully engineered to avoid scoring, broken neatly into two equal, equally scoreless halves.

Updates

Watch

A number of you sent this to me. We’d been waiting on this for a year. I ran into someone at a party who casts this court TV show. I asked my wife to be my wife and I guess accepting my marriage proposal a decade ago was enough for her. “Ask my cousin.” So, Bhavini Lad is my TV wife as we fought for custody of our daughter. And Adarsh ended up becoming a friend of mine here in LA. What became of our daughter? Watch and tell me. I don’t really watch TV.

What’s more ridiculous—the case or the mustache?

Laugh

Since this is a FUNNY Indian Newsletter, I present here the 5 funny things that I saw, heard, wrote, or remembered for the last month... otherwise known as FIVE - Funny Indian's V Events. Since, this is the ending, I leave you with eight. Enjoy.