Comedy is, at its best and worst, a communal hug – or, as Raju Hirani’s Munnabhai would describe it, a ‘Jaadu ki Jhappi’ – that Bollywood has generated.
Hindi cinema is among the most creative, it can be a lot of fun for both the audience and the directors and crew members involved. When you consider films like Half Ticket, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, and Andaz Apna Apna, you have to question if the actors and crew enjoyed producing them as much as we did watch them.
However, in many instances, we know that the sets were not all fun and games. Kishore Kumar is a vaudevillian, as everyone who knows him can attest. That is without a doubt true. Take, for example, the 1983 film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, which was a whirlwind of creativity. Never before has such a remarkable group of heavyweights been brought together. The film’s off-screen stories, on the other hand, were disproved by Shah, who described the production as “a horrific nightmare.”
Judy’s creative anarchy has been unrivaled in the decades afterward, earning a sigh of scorn from the late Kundan Shah, the JBDY circus’s ringmaster.
‘If THIS movie is being lauded as the supreme satire in Hindi film, all it tells me is that Hindi cinema hasn’t done much,’ said Jai Arjun Singh, author of a book on JBDY. Years passed before Shah’s wild satire was recognized as a cult classic, as a work of art as important as it is bizarre.
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