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Editor’s Note: Changing faces of humour
A joke could make even the most unacceptable idea seem acceptable. Read more in this week’s cover story with Kal Penn
As a young journalist at a newspaper office in Mumbai, I often ran into Vir Das, hanging out on the landing with a smoke. He was an Indian-origin but foreign-bred stand-up comedian trying to make a career in a field that did not exist.
Humour, for most Indian audiences then, (and even now) was of the slapstick variety. Mehmood had given way to Kader Khan and Shakti Kapoor. The innuendos were loud, and the jokes were crass.
My first exposure to well-written, intelligent humour came when I watched my first Oscar ceremony. Why can’t we laugh at ourselves like them, I wondered.
Bright-eyed and (over) enthusiastic, I wrote a script for a film award show we were organising and gave it to the big boss. A movie called Dushman had just released, where an eerie eyed postman, played by Ashutosh Rana, was an alleged murderer: how about we start the function with a postman riding up on his bicycle and scaring the audience?
My ideas were appreciated, but put aside. A few years later, when the film award show did resort to humour to entertain our audiences, several leading actors objected. “Why are we being asked questions,” Vinod Khanna’s younger son, Akshaye (whose brother Rahul Khanna is an HT Brunch columnist) objected. “Are we being honoured or put in the dock?”
Self-deprecating humour came of age in Bollywood only when top stars like Shah Rukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan and Ranbir Kapoor brought in jokes on themselves and their contemporaries onstage. The infamous roast may have been ahead of its time, but we must appreciate the fact that the biggest stars in India aren’t averse to taking a joke on themselves (publicly, at least).
Sure, it needs sugar-coating (notice how much Kapil Sharma does that), but actors now wear their stardom lighter than ever before.
On other fronts, we find comedy clubs around every corner, and people are happy to place themselves in the front row, knowing they’ll be picked on. Sure, we hear of comedians being pulled down for what they’ve said, but I attribute that to the evolving nature of an idea that is just beginning to form.
Our cover star today represents the Indian man in the West. Born Kalpen Modi, his Americanised name, Kal Penn, has seen the Western perception of the Indian man change from the geeky, bespectacled, bobbing head with exaggerated r’s, Kal Pann presents an evolved Indian man with a sense of humour that’s in step with the world.
Comedians entertain, but they also push and provoke our thinking, and help us find a perspective we may not have easily accepted earlier. So, let’s laugh along, but not forget to recalibrate our ideas.
Also in this issue: Two fans mourn members of BTS going for military service and giving the band a break. Hormazd Sorabjee pushes the Porsche 911 GT3 RS to the limit. And in our Game Show, three young bosses re-evaluate the meaning of power in the workplace.
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From HT Brunch, October 29, 2022
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