Kyunki, once we were serenading fools

When was the last time you split sides while watching a desi film or sitcom? Can’t remember? Jaane bhi do yaaron, it’s not really your fault. Kyunki, yeh jo hai zindagi turned dour and schmaltzy ever since Anthony (Amitabh Bachchan in Amar Akbar Anthony) turned sober, Veeru (Dharmendra in Sholay) gave up his ‘soo-cidal’ stunts and Chupke Chupke, the giddy-headed Golmaal on-screen gave way to syrupy Hum-Sangh-Hai variety of soap and cinema.
Today, in this oppressive celebration of the Paleolithic, pre-Harappan parivar of popular culture, even the Chachi 420s and the Coolie No.1’s of the not-so-long-ago nineties seem distant and dinosaurian.
Indeed, an irony! Specially since Indian cinema has a long history of the laugh act. For didn’t Bollywood give the world its first verbal emoticon: Yahoo! Here was a universal exclamation that expressed unbridled joyousness and irreverence against stodgy decorum.
If, on the one hand Bollywood boasted of heroes like Shammi Kapoor and Kishore Kumar who blurred the lines between comedy and drama, then there was also the specialist laugh doctors: comedians without whose contribution the history of Hindi cinema would be drab, dry and incomplete.
Try collating archival celluloid gold without the genteel humour of Johnny Walker, the myriad moods of Mehmood, the drunken act of Keshto Mukherjee and the jig-ish lyricism of Jagdeep’s comic act, and you might end up with mere dust.
Television too had its share of humour, but only in its infancy. Then, when soap was still new in the 1980s, Indian households had their first tryst with indigenous sitcoms like Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi, Mr ya Mrs, Nukkad, Karamchand, which had a wider viewership than imported ones like I Love Lucy, Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Them and Are You Being Served. It’s only today that videshi comedy shows like Friends and Seinfeld draw more urban viewers than the Tu Tu Main Main brand of desi comedy.
Easy to understand why. For the zany togetherness of Friends Joey, Rachel, Phoebe, Ross, Monica and Chandler, the dysfunctional moorings of Bart Simpson and family in crazy suburbia, the we-are-rotten-to-the-core hilarity of Yada-Yada (meaningless conversation) king, Seinfeld follow one primary rule. They treat the viewer as a sentient being with normal IQ unlike loud, lowbrow desi sitcoms where the viewer is presumed to be mentally challenged and laughs only when overweight women wag their rolling pins, precocious kids scream their lungs out and over-the-hill men rave and rant about domestic chaos.
There’s a similar vanishing act of laughter in contemporary cinema too. The ‘90s saw a return of comedy through the David Dhawan-Govinda combine, which rewrote the rules of the game. Like a post-modern Shammi Kapoor, Govinda soon grew into a subaltern joker: talking straight to the bindaas frontbencher while talking down to the stiff upper-lipped backbencher. To him goes the credit of transforming low fashion into high fashion, lowbrow into highbrow through his gaudy, loud, scurrilous portrayals of the technicolour man who towered above the tuxedo men and the high-heeled women with a chutzpah drawn solely from the street.
While the box-office still fondly reminisces about their films, theoreticians look back at the Dhawan-Govinda ‘Nonsense’ school of cinema as a watershed mark. Today, the laugh riot is dead and the duo is struggling for a foothold, even as the rest of the funsters — Shakti Kapoor, Kader Khan, Anupam Kher, Satish Kaushik — have drifted into deadpan drama. When did popular culture lose its laugh lines? When did Indian comedy slip into a laugh-when-you-slip-on-a-banana-peel act? When did silly become a synonym for side-splitting stuff? Times are tough. The nation cries for dramatic relief. Bring out the fools.