Comedy of Errors

I can't remember myself laughing out loud watching any movies from the recent past. After all laughing out loud has reduced to ‘lol’ and lasts even lesser than that. And I cringe by the supposed comedy which exists in movies these days.Cast a fat person, a dark person, a frail person, another with a peculiar accent and you have a whole movie under the humor genre.

The Asylum

In many futile attempts, portrayals of an asylum or people who have mental illness are used as objects of humor. To be honest, miserable people who live like animals are not to be laughed at. I've never found that funny, ever. 

The overweight friend of the protagonist.

Many a times, the hero’s friend is a guy who is overweight and his weight actually forms the base of many jokes in this movie. Whatever he says, be it a joke or not, gets people laughing.

An exotic animal.

Parrot, orangutan, dog, cat, chimpanzee, you get the idea. Illegal possession of an animal or making one the protagonist forms the basis of humor (or so they think). It gives an insight into the absence of creativity of the script writer. 

Physique and appearance.

A dark skinned person, a person with a cleft lip, one with bunny teeth, and another with some physical disability or dwarfism aspiring to be in show business or the like becomes the premise for two plus hours. 

I wonder why the good old situational and observational comedy does not feature in scripts of these times. I can say that people are more light headed today as compared to our serious and confused ancestors . But I must say that good comedy existed in the 80's and 90’s after which it has somehow deteriorated. Sex comedies and sarcasm are on the rise, punch lines with double meanings are in and a humor movie hardly gives us a laugh or two, not more. For an average movie loving Keralite, the classic Mohanlal-Srinivasan comedy from the 90’s, will top their list of favorite humor. Even though there were traces of black comedy in those, the evergreen classics guarantee many laughs even if we watch it for the umpteenth time. The dialogues are popular among the kids who weren't even born during at that era. 

It is easy to make you cry, but it is difficult to make you laugh. And in the process when movies try too hard to get a laugh out of the audience it shows. They end up being unintentionally funny.

So to sum it up, I am going to just cuddle on my couch and watch one of my most favorite movies, ‘Godfather’ (Malayalam), over a cup of tea and biscuits. And laugh like I am watching it for the first time. That is my idea of light, genuine comedy and the most inexpensive form of stress relief.