What do the graphic novel Watchmen, Bollywood and America have in common? They all have to deal with the mystery of the missing ‘comedian’. For the uninitiated, between his acts of making imperialist propaganda with CGI abs and the trials and travails of caped crusaders battling film critics, Zack Snyder made Watchmen, a graphic novel retelling masquerading as a movie, whose plot revolves around the untimely demise of a misogynist psychopath called the Comedian.
The same issue plagued Bollywood, not the misogynist psychopaths, though they might have been there, but missing comedians. Earlier, Bollywood plots had clear compartmentalisation: the hero bragged about his relationship with his mother, the mother looked stoic and sad, the heroine danced, the villain drank Vat 69 while usurping poor people’s land, and the comedian made the audience laugh. All that changed with Dharmendra’s comic turn in Chupke Chupke and Amitabh Bachchan swapping the angry young man for a swaggering jester in Amar Akbar Anthony.
