Mayank Shekhar: The curious case of Kapil Sharma

Besides standup comedian Kapil Sharma the most popular Indian to emerge from Amritsar has to be Dr Manmohan Singh This fact Ive noticed Sharma tends to repeat a lot in his interviews Surely there must be many other biggies from Amritsar Top chef Vikas Khanna for instance comes to mind But hearing his name most Indians are likely to go as voters always do after the elections Kaun sa vikaas Kahan hai vikaas Khanna serves New Yorkers mainly he appears on Indian TV on occasion so I guess he doesnt countIf Firangi is vaguely modeled on Lagaan then Kapil Sharma is Aamir KhanSo lets stick to Sharma and Dr Singh both couldnt possibly belong to more separate worlds The latter being the understated academicbureaucrat parttime politician and a former Prime Minister whos stood for the sort of civility in public life that appears hard to replicate Sharma on the other hand is a loud arrogant kinda funnyman whos suitably employed his quickwitted cockiness to introduce insult or takedown humour in mainstream Hindi stagecomedy You may or may not agree with my assertion Or his comedy for that matter But you only have to compare Sharma with the past relatively reverential mainstream heroes of the Hindi standup scene who were essentially chutkula lekhaks joke tellers even mimics going Aur meri agli peshkash hai mera agla item Johnny Lever Raju Shrivas tav and the lot to sense how different Sharma was from the rest This is besides the fact that hes infinitely better looking which makes for better televisionWatching him first on Laughter Challenge a talent hunt where I suppose he made it big I thought he was a PakistaniPunjabi comedian Maybe the suspicion had something to do with his style of comedy it was semifeudal very subcontinental where womenwives househelps the audience even the judges were butts of jokes a lot of which had to do with peoples looks or how poor they were etc To be fair as the crow flies Amritsar is less than 50 kilometres from Lahore How much can manmade sarhad skew a sense of humour And so The Kapil Sharma Show centred wholly on the lead standup comic partchat partskit chiefly theatrical entertainment seemed at once a cross between Umer Shareefs Pak plays Buddha Ghar Par Hai Baqra Qishton Pe etc and the BritishAsian The Kumars At 42 where Sanjeev Bhaskar plays a middleaged son Meera Sayal is the equivalent of daadi cute grandmum and with a bunch of others they interview celebrities visiting their makebelieve living room with the fourth wall facing the audienceKapil played Bittu Sharma on his show which by the way is also the name of Sonam Kapoors character in Delhi6 The incredibly crazy talent Sharmas show wonderfully showcased was actually the worlds finest standup mimic Sunil Grover playing multiple characters some of them in line with the shows strange obsession with crossdressers Dont know about you I felt Grover was so much better than Sharma But then my reasons could be personal Grover and I used to do shows on the same film channel over a decade ago where hed host what was called Kaun Banega Champu brilliantly adlibbing imitating Amitabh Bachchan Shah Rukh Khan I was sincerely blown away by this wholly undiscovered star secretly hoping hed go a long way He didBut could you pull off The Kapil Sharma Show without Kapil Sharma Of course not His instant connect with the masses was immeasurable The part that endeared him most I suspect was the selfdeprecating humour over his poor English which automatically warmed him up to a whole lot of Indians whose English is no better except they feel severely underconfident about it given that ones fluency in the Queens language is often perceived as a marker for class Sharma made gags around it his unique selling proposition For once people laughed with him rather than at him The television ratings were to die for Bollywood used this platform as they would anything that has more than five people watching to help sell their blockbuster pix Viewership flew higher still Sharma would share the stage and grab greater footage with the likes of SRK Akshay Kumar Salman Khan and others Sitting them down he would ask if theyd ever imagined that some day they would make it to The Kapil Sharma Show This swag stood him apart Most shows of a similar nature tend to look up to mainstream heroes He looked straight at them as an equal without being terribly rude of courseThe association was complete People saw him as a traditional superstar Im sure he also saw himself as one Directors AbbasMustan launched him in a typical Govindatype comedy about three women lusting after this dude Im told the movie worked hard to say And then Ive just emerged from his latest film a deliberately morose preIndependence period drama where he underplays himself as a kind of a bumpkin who saves a village from the British gora and the local king taking over Its not meant to be comedy If this is vaguely modeled on Lagaan then hes Aamir Khan We are suddenly meant to take him seriously Its hard to I feel sorry for him even while yawning through it all Its unfair But then again ambitions a bitchMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycom