The New Yorker:

The “entertainer” Kareem Rahma discusses Kamala Harris’s missed opportunity on his show, meeting Andrew Cuomo, and why disagreement is more fun.

By Andrew Marantz

“Subway Takes” is the TikTok version of the “Tonight Show”: wholesome, relatable comedy, even if some episodes do acknowledge the existence of opioids and dick pics. The premise is exactly what it sounds like. The host, Kareem Rahma, sits on a New York subway and asks, “So, what’s your take?” The guest slings a take—“The internet rocks,” for example, or “Naps are the most disgusting thing”—and Rahma responds, right away, with “A hundred per cent agree” or “A hundred per cent disagree.” (There is no in-between.) They talk into microphones that are disguised as MetroCards, because why not? Sometimes the guest is a celebrity; sometimes the guest is a normal person; sometimes, this being the New York subway, a stranger lunges into the shot, interrupting the interview, and Rahma rolls with it. The actor Cate Blanchett asserts that “leaf blowers need to be eradicated from the face of the earth.” The comedian Ramy Youssef maintains that all people are fundamentally good, even Benjamin Netanyahu and George W. Bush. The musician David Byrne thinks that New York bikers should learn better street etiquette. The genre is “vertical video”—clips made for your phone, posted to Instagram or TikTok. They may shoot for an hour or longer, but each social-media clip is cut down to about two minutes. This is often enough time for Rahma to change his mind from a-hundred-per-cent agreement to a-hundred-per-cent disagreement, sometimes more than once.

Rahma mostly eschews politics—a rare level of restraint these days, when Joe Rogan is grilling the F.B.I. director and the Nelk Boys are interviewing foreign heads of state—but he’s made a few exceptions. In June, the show featured Zohran Mamdani, whose take was “I should be the mayor.” Rahma agrees. Mamdani had appeared on “Subway Takes” once before (take: “Eric Adams is a terrible mayor”), as well as on Rahma’s other online show, “Keep the Meter Running,” which also has a simple premise: Rahma hails a cab and tells the driver to take him to the driver’s favorite place in New York, which usually ends up being a restaurant. He really does keep the meter running while they talk and eat, and he really pays the fare at the end of the night—sometimes as much as eight hundred dollars.

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