Fatima Sana Shaikh has put a long-simmering complaint about Hindi comedy back on the record: women are still being written as the joke, not as the person telling it.
While promoting the Jio Hotstar series Hunkkaar: The Roar, the actor told Variety India that lighter films have thinned out, and so have the roles available to women inside them. The remarks land amid a broader push for more varied female characters across genres, where women have often been confined to supporting roles or used as comic devices.
The diagnosis
Shaikh’s central charge is that contemporary comedy leans on shorthand. Female characters, she said, are too often the target of humour built around appearance, sexuality or humiliation rather than women who generate comedy from personality, circumstance or emotional growth.
Asked about physical comedy, she was direct. “Slapstick is always sexist,” she said, adding that comedy can land without making women the butt of the joke.
She also framed the problem as one of supply. The industry now tilts toward thrillers and darker stories, she argued, and genuinely lighter films are not being made often enough at a moment when audiences need good comedy.
The lost range of the 1990s and 2000s
Shaikh’s strongest point is historical. Looking back at Hindi cinema of the 1990s and 2000s, she recalled a time when female performers had more room to experiment. She singled out Vidya Balan for “amazing” comic timing and called Juhi Chawla another strong comic presence.
Then she drew the contrast: Madhuri Dixit and Juhi Chawla were distinct from one another, as was Preity Zinta—not only in look, but in performance. Today, she said, performers are boxed into a single way of looking, being and performing, and too much feels one-dimensional.
That memory is the useful frame here. When actors feel interchangeable, the audience’s recollection of contrast becomes the standard. Shaikh’s point is that difference itself used to be commercial.
The PG-13 question
Shaikh also linked the thinning of lighter films to access. Her last light-hearted film, Aap Jaisa Koi, was a PG-13 release. Earlier comedies, she said, were often built as family viewing, citing the different characters played by Amrish Puri and Om Puri. Now, she noted, many films carry an A rating.
That matters commercially: a family ticket is a larger unit. If lighter films arrive with restrictive certificates, they narrow their audience before the first joke lands.
What to watch next
- The diagnosis: women are under-written in comedy and often reduced to appearance, sexuality or humiliation.
- The comparison: 1990s and 2000s heroines had more distinct comic registers; today’s roles feel one-dimensional.
- The prescription: write women with personality and arcs, and restore family-friendly PG-13 comedy.
Shaikh is currently promoting Hunkkaar: The Roar, alongside Zoya Hussain, Aneet Padda and Raghubir Yadav. Reports also indicate she has shot a special appearance in Ram Gopal Varma’s Police Company, which headlines Harshvardhan Rane as Daya Nayak.
Source: The Times of India
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