At a time when the world is fiercely debating limits of creative freedom as jokes and cartoons are resulting in not only beheadings but also massive rallies supporting these beheadings, the Indian entertainment industry has little to worry.
It never treaded the path that leads to beheadings.
For decades, it has been playing within a safe zone which, at most, leads to faint boycott calls of films or advertisements on social media. This zone revolves around jokes on cow, gaumutra, mandir, sadhu and Hindu deities.
Recently released film Ludo, directed-co-written by Anurag Basu and touted as a ‘dark comedy’, stays firmly within this limit. And not very creatively.
A Netflix original film, Ludo, is an anthology of four separate stories that come together in unexpected twists and turns.
While Akash and Shruti (played by Aditya Roy Kapur and Sanya Malhotra) are desperately trying to get their sex video pulled down from the Internet, Alok Kumar Gupta alias Aloo (played by Rajkumar Rao) is moving mountains for Pinky (played by Fatima Sana Sheikh) – the only woman he has ever loved and who is now married and has a baby. While a gunda Batukeshwar Tiwari alias Bittu (played by Abhishek Bachchan) emerges from jail to find his wife has a new husband and his daughter a new father, a small-town boy and a Malayali nurse together stumble upon a rogue suitcase full of money.
The film has been described as “largely entertaining” and “a mixed bag” by regular film reviewers in Left-wing publications, some of whom have heaped special praises on the cow and mandir jokes.
Let’s examine some of this attempt at humour.
In his introduction scene, Akash, who is a stand-up comic and voice artiste, cracks a cow joke and a ‘godi media’ joke.
The cow joke goes like this: Akash asks a woman from the audience which country she belongs to. The woman replies it’s New Zealand.
“Land of the Jersey cow,” says Akash. “Inke desh mein gaay sirf doodh deti hai. Par hamare desh mein doodh ke saath saath vote bhi deti hai (In their country, cow gives only milk. But in our country, it gives votes too).”
Loud applause follows.
The Link LonkNovember 20, 2020 at 11:49AM
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A Review Of The Banal Cow And Mandir Jokes In Anurag Basu’s Netflix Film Ludo - Swarajya
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