“Aapka naam to Bhaskar hi hai na?”, Isa Bhai Suratwala (Johnny Walker) enquires of Dr. Bhaskar Banerjee (Amitabh Bachchan), just to be sure. And rightly so, because a minute ago, of the three people standing around, the two total strangers Isa Bhai and Anand had pretended to be childhood friends and had addressed each other as Murarilal and Jaichand respectively. The audience burst out in laughter at this comic charade that provided a momentary relief from the inevitable reality – that the terminally ill Anand (Rajesh Khanna) did not have more than four months of life left in him. Isa Bhai’s cameo serves as an example of a comedian’s basic function – that of providing a counterbalance to the serious side of life. But under this overarching definition, how are comedians nuanced? In this two-part story let us turn the first part of the comic book using a few examples.
The ‘plug-in’ comedian – By design, many of these characters were incompetent and/or bird-brained e.g. the emaciated boxer Mohammad Ali (Jagdeep) in Qurbani (1980), the drunk tramp played by Keshto Mukherjee in Gol Maal (1980), the fool of a jailor played by Asrani in Sholay (1975), the dumb domestic help Sitaram (Asit Sen) in Aradhana (1969), the errant lackey Ramu (Junior Mehmood) in Ek Nari Do Roop (1973), the gossiping neighbor Chachi (Shubha Khote) in Benaam (1974) etc. They were not critical to the storyline and were there merely to provide relief (sometimes in a one-scene appearance). Sometimes they ‘sacrificed’ their self-esteem to make the hero appear good. Take the case of the attention-seeking laughingstock Rajen (Rajendranath) in Mere Jeevan Saathi (1972). He was there solely to make the playboy hero Prakash (Rajesh Khanna) look superior in contrast. Right till the 1980s, these plug-in comedians were to Bollywood films what dessert is to a feast – the fare was incomplete and unsatisfying without it.
Unfortunately, scriptwriters sometimes resorted to body shaming under the excuse of comedy. Here’s an example. “Ae tingu, tumhara height kitna hai?”, the six-footer Anthony Gonsalves (Amitabh Bachchan) demands to know. “Hamara height 4 foot, 4 inch”, replies the diminutive Tayab Ali (Mukhri) quaking with fear. “Mai kasam, ek haath marega 2 foot, 2 inch kar dega”, threatens Anthony waving his left hand menacingly at Tayab Ali. This exchange became one of the most recalled dialogues of Amar Akbar Anthony (1977). Tayab Ali was a control-freak father of a pretty daughter – not very different from Baldev Singh (Amrish Puri) of DDLJ (1995). Just that Mukhri’s short stature was the trigger to cast Tayab Ali as a comedian. Born in an undivided Punjab, Uma Devi was a talented singer who rendered very popular hits in films of the late 1940s. Soon, having gotten overtaken by Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle, she turned to acting. But her corpulence led to the industry affixing the seal of a comedienne on her and she was ‘re-christened’ Tun Tun. Being fat is one thing, but she was almost always made to play the now-bawling-now-grinning-now-screeching ungainly woman who waddled along life in a constant state of being deprived of men. Not only was she body-shamed, her state of deprivation and uncouthness purportedly resulted from her obesity! Where is the correlation? And these deficiencies in the person were passed off as comedy tropes. And I remember many of us laughing at those too. Just the way that Mangal’s (Shakti Kapoor) speech impediment was ‘celebrated’ throughout the length of Satte Pe Satta (1982). Films in general also tended to caricature certain professions – for example, right from Jaal (1952), the hawaldar (constable) was the stock comedian policeman – dim witted and slothful. Also, by design or otherwise, vernacular languages and dialects would end up as the butt of jokes. For example, a sardarji character reeling off in fluent Punjabi or a south Indian character speaking in a dialect-heavy Hindi with a sprinkling of the customary ‘Aiyyaiyo’ (as we see the south Indian lady in the bus exclaiming in the 1972 film Bombay to Goa) were designed to invoke laughter, in an evident ‘othering’ of vernacular. One can sense bias here because a character speaking in a dialect of Hindi-belt propriety or in Urdu was not used to provide a comic angle. In fact, even in a Telugu film industry dominated by producers from coastal Andhra, the comedian was often a character with a Telugu accent native to Telangana region.
Sometimes the plug-in comedian may be in the villain camp too to make the audience laugh, albeit unintendedly. He would be the nameless flunkey to give bad news to his boss (like their quarry escaped or their smuggled goods got caught by the police) and get a tight slap as a reward. And then there was the lovable Shetty who brought the audience alive with his one-scene appearances like the ones in Azaad (1978) and The Great Gambler (1979) where he beat the hell out of the hero in the first round, and then got bashed up himself. Laawaris (1981) was an example of national integration where an assortment of sidekicks from different linguistic States of India got a dose of their respective language by the hero – followed by a dose of their common medicine. And who can forget late Satish Kaushik’s immortal essay of the villain Tarneja’s co-conspirator Ashok in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983), with the crowning piece being the telephone sequence with Naseeruddin Shah.
