Bollywood For Beginners: Part 8

Note: This series was originally posted to my Bollywood blogspot blog and represents the cumulation of the wisdom of a decade or so spent in the Bollywood trenches. It would have last been edited in about 2014.

Bollywood for Beginners 8

Bollywood Character Archetype: The Comedian

Comedy is a big part of paisa-vasool (filmi speak for getting your money’s worth) so any decent masala film will have at least one comedian to provide it. Traditionally masala films have what is called a “comedy track,” a comic subplot that may or may not intersect with the main story. A comic track squeezes around the main narrative, bubbling to the surface when it’s needed. Imagine if Batman in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) had a mechanic who sported a plumber’s crack and was always comically annoyed at the state the batmobiles were returned in. (Perhaps played by Danny McBride.) 

While it may seem like an odd fit on the surface, the presence of comedy doesn’t detract from serious topics and, in fact, having a comedian crack a joke at the right time might just reveal a previously hidden truth, like the gravediggers in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. And comedy is one of many tools in the masala filmmakers arsenal that prevents fatigue so audiences can enjoy a 3 hour film on a serious topic without getting burned out. They are both clowns and Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad--adding just enough levity to make the coming tragedy seem that much worse. 

While the self-contained “comedy track” is still used very frequently in South Indian films, today when comedians are used in Bollywood, they tend to be as minor characters in the main plot--playing over-the-top fathers, wacky aunties, and inept policemen. The 2008 action-drama-thills-heavy Race, for example, featured a wacky fruit-obsessed policeman trying to catch the two outlaw heroes and in the 2010 action-drama-thrills heavy Wanted, the heroine’s landlord was a older gentleman who acted (and dressed) as if he was a hip young teenager.

Comedians had their heyday in the 1940s through 1960s but as the 1970s dawned and the two-hero film became more popular, the comedy track was often left to one of the heroes. For example, top hero Dharmendra played the comedian with a well-loved drunk routine in the 1975 two-hero film Sholay. Still, the dedicated comedian didn’t die out completely and comedy roles are still an integral part of Bollywood today. In fact, quite a few of the actors who play comedian roles in contemporary Bollywood, like Paresh Rawal and Lilette Dubey, come from well respected theater backgrounds, and balance their comedianing with serious theater and arthouse films.

Bollywood also has comedic films, which tend to be overrun with comedians, but in a nice reverse of the masala trope, these will often have a moment or two of bittersweet pathos to balance out all the comedy. Films featuring three or four comedians as “co-leads” are very typical and a lot of humor is drawn from their interactions with themselves and with others, much like the Three Stooges or Marx Brothers. And like the Three Stooges, the humor can get very slapsticky and broad, with gags punctuated by comic noises on the soundtrack or involving exaggerated double takes and reactions from the actors involved. 

Humor is subjective and some humor found in Bollywood films may be too crass or too broad for the type of Western viewer who enjoys “foreign film” and some humor, especially that based in word play or specific cultural references, might be too opaque, unable to be communicated via subtitle. And sometimes it’s all of these things at once: the climax of comedy film Golmaal 3 (2010) has comedian Johnny Lever in a ridiculous pair of tight pink pants spoofing the 2008 hit film Ghajini, which involved memory loss, by mistaking other characters for other filmi characters and spoofing those characters while also accidentally on purpose mishearing other Hindi words and doing funny dances and bugging out his eyes while the background score is filled with slide whistles and boing-boing noises--a fully packed five minutes completely incomprehensible to those who know nothing of Hindi film but completely hilarious to those who do.