Speaking of Bachchan, he gave us some great comic moments in the 1970s, from the masquerading lit professor in Chupke Chupke to street-smart bootlegger in Amar Akbar Anthony. Leading men aside, Bollywood comedy is mainly associated with Johnny Walker, Utpal Dutt, Jagdeep, Asrani, Johnny Lever and going further back, Bhagwan Dada whose funny dance steps are believed to have inspired Amitabh Bachchan. Even in a dramatic Western like Sholay, he’s given the responsibility of adding the goofier touch. Decades later, Dharmendra revealed a softer side in Hrishikesh Mukherjee gems Chupke Chupke and Guddi. Dilip Kumar’s reputation rests on tragedies but when given the material, nobody could bring the house down quite like him. Some, like Aamir Khan who infected Andaz Apna Apna with screwball silliness (he was a better comic than a boyish romantic star – watch Ishq or the more recent 3 Idiots and PK for proof) have long held Govinda in high esteem.Ĭomedy also springs from unexpected sources. Govinda, who entertained the masses with his 90s crowd-pleasers, is long dismissed as “tacky” though younger stars like Ranveer Singh and Varun Dhawan are now openly acknowledging his debt and trying to raise his profile on chat shows. For a time, the Kumar brothers (Ashok, Kishore and Anoop) tried their luck as Bollywood’s answer to Marx brothers.
Same goes for Kishore Kumar, who thought he was a born singer but turned out, to the delight of film-goers, to be a complete natural as a funnyman. Mehmood is rarely given his due, despite being a highly prolific star. Now, think of the stars who lent their heft to Hindi comedies. “If THIS film is being seen as the ultimate satire in Hindi cinema,” he told Jai Arjun Singh, author of a book on JBDY, “all it tells me is that Hindi cinema hasn’t achieved much.” We had to wait for years before Shah’s lunatic satire was declared a cult classic, as a piece of filmmaking that’s as meaningful as it is mad. But Shah punctured the film’s off-screen myths when he said the making was “a bloody nightmare.” In the decades since, JBDY’s inspired lunacy has been unrepeatable, a situation that provoked a sigh of disapproval from the JBDY circus’ ringmaster, the late Kundan Shah. Never before have such an incredible bunch of gifted heavyweights (to be fair, they were lightweights back then) – Kundan Shah, Om Puri, Pankaj Kapur, Bhakti Barve, Ravi Baswani, Naseeruddin Shah and Satish Shah to name a few – have come together in the making of a Bollywood comedy. Take 1983’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, a madhouse of talent. So, Kishoreda showed up on the sets with half head and half moustache shaved off and half intact! Moral of the story: he is fun to see on screen, not so fun to work with. One popular and peculiar story goes that a producer had paid him only half his due. But Half Ticket’s loveable delinquent was, by most accounts, a rather difficult and eccentric person who kicked up a fuss when his payment failed to arrive. Ask anyone and they will vouch for Kishore Kumar’s vaudevillian genius. But in many cases, we do know that it was not all play and party on the sets. Thinking of Half Ticket, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro or Andaz Apna Apna, one often wonders if the cast and crew had as much fun making them as we had watching them. When Hindi cinema is at its inspired high watermark madness, it can be a lot of fun – both for the audience and filmmakers and crew behind the making of the film. It is high time comedies are accorded the respectability they deserve or at least an acknowledgement that funny is a serious business.Ĭomedy is a communal hug – a “jaadu ki jhappi” as Raju Hirani’s Munnabhai would have it – that Bollywood has churned out in the best of times and bleakest of times.
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