The News Mockers

While satire on TV is a well-developed genre in the West — be it the pioneering 1960s BBC show That Was The Week That Was or the more recent The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on NBC — politics has not always been ha ha hee hee in India.

Suddenly, everywhere you look, a bunch of seriously irreverent standup comics is heaping abuse on politicians, mimicking their accents, speeches and mannerisms.

In a news environment that deifies film stars — with every word they utter becoming a sound bite — television’s new brand of buffoonery is a breath of fresh air. It pricks the bubble of reportage that is so sugary it is diabetic. Take your pick: the spoof on the perennially politically correct Aishwarya Rai in Gustakhi Maaf; the high-on-brawn-low-on-brains puppet act of Salman Khan in Double Take; the biting dissection of the kundli crisis in the Ash-Abhishek marriage; Cyrus Broacha’s hilarious spoof of the content of Jessica Hines’s book in The Week That Wasn’t; or the take on Shilpa Shetty in Celebrity Big Brother in News on the Loose.

Humour is suddenly on a high on TV. In fact, when Shah Rukh Khan was asked what made his Kaun Banega Crorepati show different from Amitabh Bachchan’s, he said considering humour was becoming a phenomenon, he would make his show funnier — therefore, the biwi jokes and the lead-ups to commercial breaks. While the comic genre may be as old as drama (Yeh Joh Hai Zindagi and the likes of it in Doordarshan’s nascent days), it seems to have come of age. While Sajid Khan brutally spoofs an in-the-news-and-all-over-the-place Vidhu Vinod Chopra during the Eklavya publicity deluge, Cyrus Sahukar’s Simi Girebaal, a spoof of celebrity show host Simi Garewal, on MTV got higher ratings than the original.

Shekhar Suman, a pioneer in targeting bigwigs (remember Movers & Shakers?), says, “Poll Khol is more editorial in its take — we record just an hour before the telecast to make it topical. We take comedy beyond slapstick and caricature. In a way, we give news in our show.” He says that is how satire in news can be a force to reckon with.

Raju Srivastav, who hosts Aisi Ki Taisi, the recently launched comic news act on Aaj Tak, agrees, “We shoot daily as our content has to be up-to-date.” So you have him make wisecracks about the DMK-CPI(M) fracas the day after the incident rocked Parliament or make fun of the Indian cricket team’s performance the evening after a match.

Raju Srivastav: My most irreverent act in Aisi Ki Taisi so far has been on Advani when I dressed up, put on make-up and acted like him. I usually limit myself to mimicking leaders like Amar Singh, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Atalji and Lalu Yadav, but acting as Advani was an exception.

Cyrus Broacha: Everything in The Week That Wasn’t is irreverent vomit. But once we had to edit out a reference to Pramod Mahajan in a comment on his death. The latest would be a mock interview with Ram Jethmalani on the Jessica Lall case, where we gave a different take to his real responses in a serious interview, by changing the questions.

Cyrus Sahukar: My Girebaal act leads the list though my most irreverent act was prancing around and popping out of the bushes, dressed as Tarzan, in the midst of a shoot. I wish we were allowed to be more irreverent. There is so much that is funny in India.

Vir Das: In News on the Loose, we did a spoof called Tumhari Sonia in the wake of Sonia Gandhi’s letter to the PM over the FDI issue. We also had a gag where we dressed as the FM, P Chidambaram, and sang ‘You look wonderful tonight; your budget is too tight’ set to an Elton John tune. Ripping apart Chinese prez Hu Jintao (unthinkable with a state guest) was another good one.

Shekhar Suman: Our take on Lalu’s misrule in Poll Khol angered him and he said “Shekhar takes my name to earn his rozi-roti,” to which I said it was he who had taken away the rozi-roti of the Biharis because of which they’re forced to go to other cities. Our takes on the PM as a yes man and the role of Mulayam Singh’s government in hushing up the Nithari case are also stuff no other show would indulge in.

Pulling Strings

NDTV’s puppets were the first to add political humour to a news channel in India. Here’s how the strings were pulled.

Smeeta Chakrabarti, head of production, NDTV 24×7, says Gustakhi Maaf and Double Take were introduced within a year of the launch of the news channel in 1998. “The trigger was a show on political puppets on a European channel,” she says.

“The French have some of the best TV marionettes and I was part of the team that NDTV sent to Paris to learn how to manipulate and give voice to them. Now they are made in our factory in Delhi,” she says. “Initially, we were apprehensive about having an AB Vajpayee puppet, as he was the PM then. However, after that, we started getting calls from politicians as to why we did not have a puppet on them. Lalu Yadav even gave suggestions on what he would like his puppet to say.” Lalu’s puppet even had tea with the original, says Richa Sahay, producer of the puppet series. And the only person who did not find his marionette too funny Dharmendra.