When Shah Rukh Khan took Karan Johar aside to tell him Poo isn’t funny, Kareena Kapoor’s dad compared her to Johnny Lever

He said that Kareena is more like Poo in real life than Geet, her character from Jab We Met. “Poo I would hang out with any time,” he said, adding, “I tell her, if circumstances were different, I would desperately want to be in a relationship with you.” When it was pointed out to Karan that even more than two decades later, people are still repeating Poo’s lines, he said, “When I look back, I wonder if PHAT was even a thing, or did I create it? Somebody will have to tell me. Because in 2001, when I had written those dialogues and she was mouthing them, nobody laughed on set. Only I was laughing behind the monitor, and she was laughing rendering those lines.”

He continued, “No one, literally no one got what we were doing. At one point, Shah Rukh took me aside and said, ‘I think you’re getting carried away with this, because I don’t think she’s funny’… I remember her telling me that Daboo uncle called her and told her, ‘You’re playing some version of Johnny Lever in this film, you’re a comedian with lines nobody laughed at’. We thought we had epically failed with the character.”

Karan said that Poo was ‘ahead of her time’, but also admitted that the character wasn’t original, and was ‘fully derivative’ of Alicia Silverstone’s character from the film Clueless. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham became a massive box office hit, and is still regarded as a seminal Bollywood film of its era.