When Will Smith gobsmacked Chris Rock with a spot of misplaced aggression on Oscar night, he actually deflected focus from what should have been the pertinent issue of conversation from the show. The Hollywood superstar’s action eclipsed the fact that his wife Jada Pinkett Smith was at the receiving end of a rather rude bout of body shaming by presenter Rock, when he chose to take a potshot at Jada’s alopecia with his puerile GI Jane 2 joke.
While social media crusaders against body shaming have denounced Rock’s unkind jibe at Jada, the joke does reflect an awful truth about Hollywood, and showbiz in general: The new wave of sanitised realism in cinema, TV and OTT everywhere may have forced political correctness into screens, but off screen the story could be different. The world of showbiz, besotted with the idea of body perfect, is yet to rid its minds of the tendency to shame physical limitations. Being a comedian, Rock would perhaps draw licence from the fact that humour as a genre is allowed to get away with being politically incorrect in the name of creativity. By that logic, however, shaming of every kind that films and film folks have ever engaged in would clamour for acceptance and demand to be above scrutiny.
Coming to new-age Bollywood, where our celebrities almost never say anything or behave in any manner beyond how their PR mechanism tells them to, such action as Smith’s is perhaps unimaginable. However, the story is just the opposite on screen. When it comes to creating funny antics, few film industries anywhere in the world have so consistently churned out an overload of political incorrectness down the decades as Bollywood.
You could argue jokes about physical imperfection need not necessarily be offensive. Consider Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s 1979 comedy gem, Gol Maal. In one of the funniest exchanges ever written for the Hindi screen, Amol Palekar quips to Utpal Dutt: “Jaise andhe ko andha nahi kehna chahiye, behre ko behra nahi kehna chahiye, waise hi buddhe ko buddha nahi kehna chahiye. Isse uske dil ko thhes pohochti hai (Just as one must never address the blind as blind or the deaf as deaf, we must refrain from addressing old men as old men. It’d hurt their feelings).”
Dialogue writer Raahi Masoom Raza’s line underlines irreverence tinged with gentle sarcasm characteristic of the film as a whole, one that never slips into the realm of hurtful gimmickry and yet remains funny. It is a line that justifies its existence within the mad, mad world of Gol Maal because the protagonist — Palekar’s cheeky Lakshman Prasad ‘Lucky’ Sharma — was deliberately indulging in a spot of mischief to rile his on-screen adversary, Dutt’s uptight millionaire Bhavani Shankar.
The scene highlights an impudence most modernday Bollywood writers would think twice before introducing in their creative process in the name of humour, mostly because we live in times when political correctness in every kind of content — especially comedy — has become as important as the content itself. There is a reason why this had to happen, sooner or later. Bollywood, with its tendency to go overboard with whatever it shows, had course rectification coming.
Commercial filmmakers have traditionally tended to play to the gallery with everything they have ever portrayed in terms of plot and characters — be it love, hate, violence, humour, tragedy or melodrama. Humour, especially, gravitated towards being loud and crass, given Bollywood’s incessant urge to cater to the lowest common denominator. With the exception of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee or Gulzar among a handful who defined middle of the road cinema of yore, not many mainstream filmmakers bothered about creating comedy that stayed within limits of decency even if it were provocative.
The advent of social media in modern times has been the biggest reason why focus fell on Bollywood’s traditional slant at being politically incorrect with humour. Platforms as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook opened up conversations which made filmmakers realise not everything that was being passed off as humour had perhaps seemed funny to the audience. In an era when social media regularly promotes discussion around body issues or sexuality, jokes around body shaming and sexual identity had to become uncool.
While the use of ‘fat jokes’, ‘bald jokes’ or transgender and gay gags have mostly slowed down over the past half a decade or so, several other issues related to appearance and personality still demand complete course rectification. The Bollywood brand of cheap laughs over the decades has, after all, targeted everything that’s physical — from colour of skin to provincial identity. Anyone from South India was invariably a ‘Madrasi’ and acted out set clichés on screen. If you played a ‘Bangali’ from ‘Kolkotta’ you were probably a funny man/woman speaking Hindi with a strange accent, as well as a twisted version of the Bangla language itself, which no sane Bengali could identify with. There were the ‘Chinky’ jokes and the Sardar jokes, too, competing with ‘funny’ scenes created around the differently abled (andha, behra and kanya jokes), besides the ‘paagalkhana and paagal aadmi’ gags.
It would perhaps be unfair to take a blanket stance and be outrightly dismissive about Bollywood’s ways of the past. Every generation does its bit of course rectification, and if we are standing in a space that can be deemed somewhat proper today, reaching here has been a gradual process. Our mainstream cinema has been growing over the decades and, along with it, the realisation that entertainment needs to be served with sensibility has grown, too.
Till the noughties, this realisation was perhaps not deemed important enough to be worth attention. Setting up political correctness could hardly be of significance during the process of scriptwriting back in the day when the script itself wasn’t a vital enough aspect of filmmaking. Back in the seventies or eighties, jokes around physical appearance perhaps seemed okay to an audience that was used to lovingly refer to its reigning superstar, Amitabh Bachchan, as Lambu. Manmohan Desai even had a song in his 1983 hit Coolie where the lyrics were all about Bachchan, or ‘Lambu ji’ (Mr Lanky), and Rishi Kapoor, or ‘Tingu ji’ (Mr Shorty), engaging in an exchange of one-upmanship, dissing each other using physical traits. Bachchan’s other frequent collaborator, Prakash Mehra, imagined an entire song (Mere angane mein in the 1981 superhit Laawaris) where the superstar, dressed in drag, poked fun at men with wives that were lambi (tall), moti (overweight), kaali (dark-skinned), gori (fair-skinned), or chhoti (short).
The core idea behind many such lyrics back in the day was often drawn from traditional songs of the soil. In today’s social media-driven world, where debates and arguments are often fingertip exercises for many, and when OTT show makers need legal advice before greenlighting scripts, it may not be easy to fathom an era that was indulgent about letting such a brand of humour thrive. After all, those were times when actresses actually made a flourishing career playing the funny fat woman in Bollywood (recall Tun Tun in the seventies and the eighties and Guddi Maruti in the nineties). Commercial cinema changed thematically by the 2000s, but the only change in the industry’s attitude towards humour lay in the fact that bawdy jokes aimed at physical appearance or deformity were now jostling for screen space with funnies woven around sexuality. So, characters that were the butt of fat jokes such as Sweetu Kapoor (Delnaaz Paul in Kal Ho Naa Ho) and Tsunami Singh (Rajat Rawail in Bodyguard) coexisted with the homophobic Kantaben (Sulbha Arya in Kal Ho Naa Ho) and the gay Dean Yogi Vashisht (Rishi Kapoor in Student Of The Year).
There is a funny irony, in this context, about social media reaction to Bollywood’s offensive jokes. Online conversations may have been a large reason why fat jokes, for instance, have gone off the screenwriter’s radar. Yet, fat shaming of stars continues unabated by trolls on the same platforms. Several actresses including Vidya Balan, Sonakshi Sinha, Ileana D’Cruz and Huma Qureshi, who have been victims of such trolling have time and again spoken out against such negativity though, unlike sanitising the big screen of offensive humour, no clear solution seems in sight.
On screen, baldness was the other most common source of jocular inspiration, apart from obesity. But while overweight characters were almost always used to generate low-brow humour, the bald look was often about establishing which end of the story’s moral curve the male protagonist belonged to. In most cases, the bald guy was villain of the show — random recall would bring to mind the numerous evil avatars of Amrish Puri, Prem Chopra, Anupam Kher and Paresh Rawal, or Kulbhushan Kharbanda in Shaan and Sanjay Dutt in Agneepath.
In fact, in Hindi films the hero seemed to hit bald mode only when he was on an angry, avenging spree (think Aamir Khan in Ghajini or Shahid Kapoor in Haider). Of course, historical depictions as Ranveer Singh in Bajirao Mastani and Akshay Kumar’s look in the forthcoming Prithviraj have been obvious exceptions. The rare instances, where the hero’s baldness was focus of the story without being mere source of cheap slapstick, have been Ayushmann Khurrana’s Bala and Ujda Chaman starring Sunny Singh. Both films were comedies that highlighted the travails of young men suffering from premature balding. While Bala got it right, Ujda Chaman seemed to lose the plot. The rare film that took the conversation into female domain was the 2019 release, Gone Kesh, where Shweta Tripathi played a small town girl afflicted with spot baldness.
While on baldness and celebrities in India, it is laudable how Rajinikanth, Anupam Kher and Akshaye Khanna have thumbed a nose at body shamers and carried the shaved pate into the public space off screen, too. They constitute a minority club, considering many of our top stars still opt for secret hair weaving sessions or use wigs in order to keep up a show of being body perfect. Bollywood’s closet bald celebs could pick a tip or two from Jada Pinkett Smith, or Hollywood biggies such as Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel, Jason Statham and Bruce Willis, who made the clean top fashionable on and off screen without getting too big-headed about it.
Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist, and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.
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