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Comedy in Indian cinema often touched the outlines of normal bodily
functions THE current joke among film buffs is that Aamir Khan should have held the world premiere of his latest hit film Delhi Belly inside a public toilet for its realistic sound and smell effects! It would have been the first of its kind. ‘King’ Aamir promoted each film of his with typical flair but missed out on this. Make no doubt about this, Delhi Belly is a hit, collections are huge even during week days where multiplexes screened seven, eight shows daily. Inside the theatre, one can hear guffaws, initially with some embarrassment, but later on, full-throated. To show how modern, young India talked and how Delhiites lived, Aamir Khan’s film dug deep into our normal lives and concentrated heavily on ‘delicate’ issues, normally not discussed in public. The average Indian filmgoer accepted the fact that comedy in Hindi films was neither subtle nor sophisticated because of the fear that it would go over the heads of our audiences. So, the films focussed on the obvious. Fat men and women, slipping on banana peels and falling down, typical regional accents (the kind of ‘ayyeayyeyo’ attributed to South Indians speaking Hindi), physical handicaps like stammering, hearing problems, regional mannerisms, which often led to controversies among the more sensitive among those portrayed, gay behaviour (which was way off the mark) and other cheap gimmicks. Films were never tired of portraying these whims and passing them off as humour.
In the age of liberation, comedy took on heavy sexual overtones — the accent being on double meaning dialogue, indirect and crude references to male and female sexual organs and the sex act itself. Coupled with dialogues, overloaded with double meaning, this was supposed to generate laughter. With natural comedians like Johny Walker disappearing from the screens and replaced by the hero himself enacting comedy, this kind of situations became easy to create, particularly during the Govinda era when comedy was crass. Of course, comedy comes in many colours. The two rare volumes Rationale of the Dirty Joke covered every aspect of human life though the brand of humour that was crude to the extreme. Normal bodily functions like farting or going to the toilet were regarded as part of such humour. Comedy in Indian cinema touched the outlines of these topics but Delhi Belly crashed all such delicate barriers. Can foul language be regarded as comedy? In the Aamir film, one lost count of the ‘f’ word which was used as an adjective before every word! Add to this lots of the ‘shit’ word, the occasional c--t word, while the maa-behen abuses were reserved for the villains and the sidekicks. The ‘F’ word was the special trademark of the urban elite classes, professionals like men in advertising, media, photography and so on. Every frustration, loss of temper and irritation was brought out with the ‘f’ word. Aamir Khan took pains to explain that his film belonged to the ‘now’ era, when conversation among the students and young professionals was peppered with the ‘word’. There may be some truth in what Aamir says but at the same time hundreds of thousands of young people are not obsessed with four-letter words. Can then toilet humour be justified? The film revolves around a hilarious goof-up where a stool sample was mistaken for a package of diamonds leading to all sorts of mixups. The situations were no doubt hilarious and Aamir khan had this as an excuse to pack the film with never-ending toilet humour. Every character had to relieve himself with explosive violence, there was always no water in the toilets, men were on the run clutching their bellies. The soundtrack was kept busy with such noises. In the past, music directors and sound recordings were credited with instruments producing different types of noises, most of them melodious. Aamir Khan has set a new trend with his fart symphony. Will this catch on? In the copy cat world of Hindi cinema, the success of Delhi Belly could surely lead to similar situations and sounds. Forget, Kashmir,
Switzerland or New Zealand, the most important scenes of future Hindi
films could be enacted in the loo!
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