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AIB Knockout roast of Ranveer and Arjun was brave but not scandalous enough

by Deepanjana Pal Jan 29, 2015 21:19 IST

One not-so-cold night in December last year, 4,000 people filled a stadium in Mumbai to watch a live show that featured Arjun Kapoor, Ranveer Singh, Karan Johar and others. The tickets for this live event were priced in thousands and the profits would be donated to charity. All this sounds standard, but AIB Knockout was anything but a regular Bollywood event. It was the first honest-to-goodness "roast" that we've had in India.

First done in 1949, the roast is an American comedy tradition. A guest of honour is invited to sit centrestage while a clutch of comedians cracks jokes at the guest's expense. Back in the 1950s, the jokes may have been good natured, but roasts today are offensive, politically incorrect, exaggerated and filled with foul language. A roast is open season - if you're on that stage, you can say anything to one another. The whole point of the evening is that it's savage.

Writing about a roast is difficult, particularly for fuddy-duddies like me who find abusive language eye-roll-inducingly juvenile. Anything I write about a roast is in danger of turning into a game of Fill in the Blanks or Guess What The Asterisk Stands For. Here's an example. During Comedy Central's roast of Hugh Hefner in 2001, Drew Carey said that the channel had told him that he couldn't call Osama bin Laden a "towel head". So Carey called him "c***s***er" and said, "Osama bin Laden looks like a bearded c*** with a turban on top."

Is Arjun Kapoor yelling "bh*****ke" or Ranveer Singh making gestures that suggest he's performing fellatio really that scandalous in comparison?

AIB Knockout's guests of honour were Kapoor and Singh. The "roastmaster" (or master of ceremonies) was Karan Johar. The roasters were All India Bakchod (Tanmay Bhat, Gursimran Khamba, Rohan Joshi and Ashish Shakya), television host Raghu Ram, film critic Rajeev Masand, as well as comedians Aditi Mittal and Abish Matthew. The show began with this introduction for Johar: "A pilot, a sailor, an actor, a model, an architect, are all men he would happily f**k. Please welcome to the stage, Karan Johar." Johar retaliated by describing the roasters as "the who the f**k is who of Mumbai".

Over the course of the next two hours, the roasters savaged Kapoor for having failed class 12, belonging to a Bollywood family and being a bad actor. Singh's supposedly uncontrollable libido was the butt of many jokes as was his previous relationship with Anushka Sharma. Collateral damage for the show were Kapoor and Singh's current girlfriends, Sonakshi Sinha and Deepika Padukone who gamely giggled and guffawed at every joked cracked at their and their loved ones' expense. Alia Bhatt got picked on as did Boney, Sanjay and Anil Kapoor. After the roasters were done roasting each other and the two actors, Kapoor and Singh took the mic and gave it right back to AIB and gang.

What's interesting about AIB Knockout is that in a culture like ours - which adores Bollywood to the point that it is virtually the only cultural industry that is thriving - so many people want to see stars cut down to size. Not one person in the audience walked out or was offended. They laughed and cheered as abuse was flung and their heroes were belittled. Films and actors are big business everywhere in the world. Look at the way Hollywood has charmed people across the globe. The difference between our love for movies and that of most other countries is that Bollywood has managed to crowd out everything else. Elsewhere in the world, fashion magazines like Vogue and GQ use models for its covers and only occasionally feature actors. In India, actors are standard cover models for practically every publication whether it's target area is tech or fashion. Music, literature, art, theatre -- every other cultural industry has been left to languish and decay. Nothing is cherished as much as popular cinema in general and Bollywood in particular. Nothing else is as glamorous; nothing else's appeal cuts across classes in the same way.

Yet for all this staggering popularity, what AIB Knockout shows is that fans are hungry to see their heroes stripped of their privileges. The stars think they know the pulse of the "masses" and make films in which their heroic images are always intact because they believe that is how audiences see them. News flash: more than a million people want to see Bollywood stars be bludgeoned and bullied. Because it wasn't specifically Kapoor, Singh or Johar being attacked in AIB Knockout. They stood for the entire popular film industry with its nepotism, tackiness, hypocrisy and blatant disregard for quality.

Everyone on the AIB Knockout stage was a placeholder for a certain group of people. Kapoor and Singh embodied all Bollywood actors. Johar had a double role as the Bollywood producer and the gay man, both characterised by a voracious lust. He wasn't the only person reduced to being a sex object. Mittal was there to facilitate the s**t-themed jokes. Bhat was there for the fat guy jokes; Shakya for the black guy jokes. Masand sat and took many hits for all film reviewers. They all knew what parts they were playing and they played them to the hilt.

As someone who considers some of the people on that stage friends, what disappointed me was not the fact that roast was tasteless, but that most of the jokes were hackneyed. They would soon become repetitive. Surely after the fourth person observes Joshi is "generic", Bhat is fat and Shakya is not fair, it gets boring? (Apparently not, if you're young and/or from Bollywood, if the number of hits the AIB Knockout video has got is any indication.) Bhat, Khamba, Joshi, Shakya and Mittal are all cleverer, funnier and more insightful than the worn out "you're so fat/ dark/ gay/ s**tty" jokes. From this crew - and Johar, for that matter - I expect more delicious jibes, proper provocation and less cliches. Still, even for humourless, old fogies like me, there are quite a few good punchlines in AIB Knockout, provided you can wade past the juvenile cussing to appreciate them.

As Johar says right at the start of AIB Knockout, this show wasn't for those easily or difficultly offended. The publicity for the show centred around warnings that it was going to be filthy, and just the promise of stars getting roasted was enough to make 4,000 people cough up as much as Rs 4,000 for a ticket to watch this happen. That's some serious bloodlust. Bollywood, if I were you, I'd be worried.

Just for the fact that AIB Knockout brought celebrities who live in ivory towers, surrounded by fawning (and often false) praise, into the real world, everyone involved in the show deserves a round of applause. Few at the top of their game have the confidence to take part in a roast and even fewer have the courage to roast them. Those who took part in AIB Knockout displayed both, and at significant risk.

Because now, the chauvinists, homophobes and general douchebags among the million-plus people who have seen the video of AIB Knockout figure they're well within their rights to make crass and offensive comments about gay, fat, dark people and women. This means Johar, Bhat, Shakya and Mittal (who are more than capable of handling such attacks, whether or not they're affected by them) as much as nameless, everyday people. The border between politically incorrect joke and hate speech is worryingly porous, particularly in a country that's hungering to cut the powerful down to size.

However, the fact that chauvinists, homophobes and general douchebags have those traits in them to begin with is not AIB's fault. Jokes don't have the magical ability to transform reasonable people into obnoxious nincompoops. Does the fact that they wrote those jokes mean AIB are chauvinists, homophobes and general douchebags? See their other videos and decide for yourself. (Simpler answer: no, they're not.)

If you're offended by AIB Knockout, just find another YouTube video to watch. Everyone else: remember, those are jokes, not news reports.