Kutty Pattalam is a Malayalam television show whose name roughly translates to “Kiddie Army”. It’s a fairly straightforward lifting of the “Kids Say the Darndest Things” concept, where kids are seated on elevated mini-thrones in front of studio audiences and prodded with leading questions until unintentional humor ensues. Consider the following a live blog of the show, only without the “live” part (and also a tenuous connection at best to “blog”.)

Five minutes in: I have a passing familiarity with Malayalam, and I am understanding approximately zero percent of what is being said right now.

The prodigious use of sound effects makes it seem like someone is playing a degraded version of Super Mario Brothers on a circa-1986 Nintendo connected to high-end Danish speakers. The overall sensation is one of disorientation, as if the sensory overload is designed to induce shock and/or seizures.

Much of the humor appears to be at the expense of parents and/or family members, who from their expressions appear to be taking it all in stride. They knew what they were signing up for.

Side note: the jump cuts are staggering. I think I have vertigo. Read more…

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to embark on an apparently impossible, wasteful or fruitless task, usually preceded by an exhortation not to, as in: “Let’s not boil the ocean here, an 80/20 should be enough”; this term suggests that the amount of effort to be expended is not worth the potential payoff; similar to the far more cringe-inducing and unnecessarily baroque mouse milking

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to persistently remind someone or a group about his or her responsibilities in a mildly unpleasant way but without acrimony; evokes the behavior of a small yippy dog that nips at one’s heels annoyingly but is generally harmless, or a sheepdog herding animals; a similar term with more whimsical connotations is tickle, as in “I’ll tickle the group for that feedback tomorrow morning if I haven’t heard from them by then”

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to embark on a task for which any potential output is far outweighed by the effort required to generate it, mouse milking is a far more cringe-inducing and unnecessarily baroque version of the more common phrase boil the ocean; users of this term generally assume a certain familiarity with those listening, as in the wrong context one can only imagine the consternation that would follow its injudicious deployment

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