The Hindu Business Line : Oh, for that hearty laugh!

While action and adventure films from Bollywood are becoming slicker by the day, and our song-and-dance socials and tear-jerkers now recognisable export material to the West, our comedies are so bad, they want to make you cry.

A still from the film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron

Wresting tears out of easily-swayed audiences is kid-stuff; making people laugh is a tough call. Last week, a so-called comedy, Wah Wah Ramji managed the impossible. It made Paresh Rawal, one of Indian film's most gifted actors look foolish, and that is something that he has never stooped to, in his long innings in Hindi and Marathi cinema.

Ramji is a struggling author, who is forced into manufacturing a reel life love-story in order to write a book. There's enough potential in the role for someone with Paresh's boundless talents to raise it above a bad script. But there's nothing even he can do when he runs into such deathless direction: the young couple is absolutely without charm, the situations are improbable, and the supporting cast is clueless.

What is it with Bollywood and comedies? This is one genre, which has never caught up with the rest: actioners and adventures are becoming slicker by the day, and our song-and-dance socials and tear-jerkers are now recognisable export material to the West. It is the use of supercharged emotions and drama that has made the likes of Shekhar Kapur, Deepa Mehta, Mira Nair, as well as such expat Indians as Manoj Night Shyamalan, and Gurinder Chaddha so popular among Hollywood honchos. But our comedies are so bad, they want to make you cry.

This summer, Priyadarsan, who has had a successful track record of converting his Malayalam hits into Hindi, came out with Hungama, with a whole host of established comics. It is an old-style comedy, reminiscent of the Western vaudevilles, where a lot of things keep happening all at once. A whole bunch of characters run in and out of the complicated storyline: an old couple from the village show up in their city home, the caretaker of that house who is helping a suitor impress a potential father-in-law by pretending to be the owner of the house is thrown into a panic, a young man who has set up his electronic shop fetches up at the house; so does a young girl in search of a job. The mess is ripe for a case of mistaken identities, and a great deal of boisterous slapstick: the climax is a wonderful 20 minutes of controlled mayhem, where the whole cast fetches up, and things get sorted out.

Fronting the lot is Priyan favourite, Paresh, who features in almost all of the director's Hindi comedies like Hera Pheri, and Tere Ghar Ke Saamne. In this one, he plays the village seth, whose arrival in town sends the rest of the characters in a spiral. Such is Paresh's control over his lines, as well as his rapport with his director, that his very appearance is enough to have you in splits.

Bollywood has always had great comics, right from comic-comics like the revered Johnny Walker to Mehmood, to comic heroes like Kishore Kumar and heroes-who-could-also-do-comedy like Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar, to the Rajendranaths and Asranis and Paintals, who were capable of underplaying but were almost never given a chance to do so, to Amitabh Bachchan who usurped the comedian's role in his heyday as an all-in-one-hero-villain-comedian, to Shakti Kapoor and Kader Khan and Govinda, the troika which ruled loud laughter in the early 1990s, to the latter-day comics like Johnny Lever, who started out as crude mimics, and then came into their own, as the hero's sidekicks.

It's not the actors who have let us down. It is our directors who don't seem to value their funny bone. Or even if they do, they do not think it is `commercially safe' subject to invest their crores in. It's partly got to do with the fact the comic's role got so emasculated in the late 1970s and the 1980s, because our movies got so crass and violent. It's also got to do with the fact that there are simply no writers who use comedy to make socially relevant films: Priyadarsan is one of those rare directors who uses broad satire to make sharp comments on social mores.

The middle-of-the-road comedies that directors like Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterji did, back in the 1970s and 1980s, were made on the premise that the whole tone of the film could be comic (that is, there did not need to be separate comedy tracks, with actors who were restricted to those sequences). In these movies, actors like Utpal Dutt and Amol Palekar use their people-next-door personas, and droll dialogue delivery to create simple, heartfelt moments which also evoked laughter: it was not as if the laughter was separate from the rest of the life lived by the characters in the films.

A superb example of popular actors being well used in a top-notch comedy was Mukherjee's all-time favourite Chupke Chupke, which starred Dharmendra, Sharmila Tagore, Amitabh Bachchan, Jaya, David, and Om Prakash. At that time, this was a revolutionary piece of anti-casting not only for the men who were much better known for kicking the villains where it hurt most, but also for the female leads, who were only meant to decorate, and not make us laugh (there were comediennes for such purposes, like Tun Tun and Shashikala; the paucity of genuine female comics is a striking feature in Bollywood, but that deserves a whole separate piece to itself).

All that laughter went down the chute when Amitabh Bachchan took over Bollywood. The only film, which used black comedy so successfully that it still has to be bettered, let alone equalled, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, was the sole exception of those times. Kundan Shah's film was such a revelation simply because it used a galaxy of superb actors like Pankaj Kapoor, Naseerudin Shah and Om Puri in situations which were deep, dark and savagely funny. The film was such a brilliant tour de force that even Shah, in his second coming 20 years later, hasn't managed to come near his debut: fearful of anything that is truly different, Bollywood steers clear of black comedy and other such sophisticated devices.

This is actually a good time to break such hoodoos. The audiences are embracing anything that is away from the trite and tired and formulaic. The soon-to-be released Maqbool, Vishal Bhardwaj's imaginative retelling of the Macbeth tale, uses Kapoor, Shah and Puri in lead roles: Shah and Puri get to do here, what they are now reserving for movies in the West, and what they have not been allowed to do in mainstream Hindi movies in a long time — essay powerful comic roles, which counterpoint the story, and help take it forward.

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