I am very fond of the movies, especially Malayalam movies. Particularly, comedy films in Malayalam. I was born in a family in which humour was cherished. There are jokes from my childhood which still make me laugh — for example, the one told by my maternal uncle who was a medical student back then, fifty years ago. His best friend, also a medical student, was a chap who seemed to specialise in unfailingly failing in every single exam he appeared for. One day, my uncle visited his friend’s home — it was an old ancestral seat. In the yard of that stately home, a well-fed billy goat was grazing calmly. The friend’s father sat on the veranda of the house and gazed at the animal chewing at the jackfruit leaves and said, “We need to make a good biriyani out of this fellow, after my son passes his exam!” Apparently, the goat heard this; he lifted his head and offered a wry smile! When I recreate this scene in my mind years after I first heard it, I still burst out laughing.

I am very familiar with all shades of humour in Malayalam literature and cinema — from the works of such stalwarts as Vaikom Muhammed Basheer, Ayyappa Panicker, Sanjayan, E V Krishna Pillai, O V Vijayan, Paul Zachariah and cartoons such as those of Toms, R K Lakshman, Sankar, Abu Abraham, Aravindan’s famous series et al. They include gentle, wistful humour to harsh, black humour. The Malayalam movies of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s were often very funny and I enjoyed them too. I have laughed at the jokes of the early generation of actors like Sankaradi, Adoor Bhasi, Bahadur, Adoor Pankajam, Adoor Bhavani, and the later generation, which included Jagathy Sreekumar, Kalpana, Mamukkoya, Mohanlal, Sreenivasan, and others. The films of P Padmarajan and Satyan Anthikkad contain so many unforgettable moments that make me laugh still! Some of it amplify the characters beautifully, and thus add heft to the storytelling; that is, they are not just a break in the storytelling or a lightening of its mood. For example, the jokes by and around the insecure husband played by Sreenivasan in Vadakkunokkiyantram, that are funny and sad at the same time. In this movie, the husband who finds his younger brother who can tell a good joke a threat — and so he decides to learn how to tell a joke so he can make his young bride laugh — and fails. The envy and the comical effort to learn the ‘art’ of joking, and its inevitable failure, evokes such mixed feelings in the viewer. The recent wave in Malayalam movies is also very funny sometimes, for example, Aavaasavyooham and Purushapretham, by Krishanth and colleagues.

In sum, telling a good joke is no joke at all. In Sanskrit plays, the vidushaka — the jester — is the only character who is allowed to criticise the king. The vidushaka‘s jokes and sense of humour are permitted to poke and burst the inflated balloons of power. This is because there is a certain hierarchy of power inherent in every joke. The significance of a joke depends on who tells it about who and to who, and when, where and how it is told. The laughter evoked by humour is inevitably the laugh of a group. Laughing alone is well-likely to be perceived as a sign of madness. To know what all a people perceive as funny, merely look for instances of collective mirth among them and you will receive a tolerably-correct answer. There is a certain power that is conferred upon those who laugh. They can use it when confronting the others; they can make fun of others. Or they can use it against themselves. In K G George’s film Yavanika, the police officer played by Mammootty barks at the character called Varunan played by Jagathy Sreekumar: “So you think that you are a great comedian, don’t you?” Varunan’s reply reveals the true essence of humour: “Acchan is mad. Amma is rheumatic and bedridden… My older sister has eloped. There’s no money to send the younger ones to school. How can I stop laughing, saar?” That is, true humour works like an antidote. Laughter inoculates you against pain.

Thinking about it from Varunan’s perspective, there is much to laugh at our society. But such laughter is hardly cruel, quite unlike the ‘rape jokes’ that fill Dileep movies which I wrote about earlier. There is reason, however, to think that the crowd that used to laugh at his rape jokes has shrunk in size by 2025. Since I like comedy movies, I decided to watch his funny movies from the early 2000s. What came to my mind when I watched them was, unfortunately, a coinage that we used at home to describe jokes made in bad taste, below-the-belt humour — valiccha wittu. They are below what we used to call katta jokes — ‘katta’ meaning a solid block, something hard and alluding towards a brainless lump. So katta jokes referred to silly jokes which made use of puns, for example. They were mostly harmless but foolish and the smiles they evoked were often tinged with disgust at their brainless shallow nature.

Valichha wittu referred to jokes which were even lower in their content and aim. ‘Wittu’ is the same as the English word ‘wit’. In Malayalam, the word valichhathu means putrid, decayed, and so on. One would use it with reference to food gone bad or toxic, invaded by bacteria. The implication is that if you eat valichha food, you will fall ill. Now, I saw that our society was one which gulped down such putrid, fetid, stinking food with nary a murmur. That Dileep’s ‘funny’ movies were such big hits in the early 2000s seems to indicate just that.

Valiccha wittu also seems to have a connection with the Malayalam word valippu, which refers to a kind of shallow speech — a kind of ‘farting through the mouth’. Meaningless, malodorous, unpleasant talk, that is.

Dileep’s movies abound with katta jokes and valichha wittu, both. Many of the ‘jokes’ in the Dileep movie called Kalyanaraman are of this sort. For example, a character substitutes one word by its opposite — alankolam (which means ugly disorder) for alankaram (decoration, beautification) and another character attributes this to ‘lack of education’. The character who made the mistake claims that he was being merely ‘colloquial’. The so-called humour hangs on a series of twisted words and their meanings. They are not funny, and but fit into the general mood of the film — a katta joke, that is.

But there are other jokes in the same movie that fit the description of valiccha wittu perfectly. For example, there is a scene in which a minor character, a helper in a wedding kitchen, and his assistant try to lift a huge vessel from the ground. The character played by the actor Innocent strides there and asks them what they were up to. “Can’t get it up,” says the assistant. To this, the questioner replies, “Don’t go around telling people you can’t get it up! What will they think?” And then he tries to lend a hand. Now, the vessel and the effort to pick it up are absolutely irrelevant to the storytelling. But the character of Innocent — his very presence on the screen — has already guaranteed a laugh to the viewer and that must be fulfilled, no matter how. A male erection joke seems to be the answer.

The Malayalam word asabhyam, or obscene, means ‘not fit for an assembly’ or a sabha. Now, who is the sabha of such a joke, or the public that it addresses? Clearly, the sabha or public that it envisages is that of adolescent boys, not even grown men. It does not include women or girls, for sure. If they are included, that is usually with the purpose of making them deeply uncomfortable — to make them lower their heads in shame, to smother their voices. These jokes are what we call ‘smutty’ — filled with cheap sexual allusions or scatological references, about pissing and shitting, and so on. These jokes are meant to concretise the female body that is unavailable to both the teller of the joke and its recipient — jokes for men, by men. It includes also the kind of jokes in which men exchange cuss words — ‘mutt’ or ‘pig’ — as whispers. Freud had much to say about such jokes.

Dileep’s comedies are often described as ‘slapstick’. Slapstick involves creating improbable situations, exaggerations, all presented with crazy fast bodily action that makes the audience laugh. The physical pushing and shoving in slapstick comedies do not culminate in violence; the hero and heroine are usually united — Charlie Chaplin’s and Buster Keaton’s movies provide the early form. But Dileep’s slapstick comes with a strong mix of the obscene and the gross. Slapstick is used to make respectable a culture that is thoroughly rotten — valichathu.

In Kalyanaraman, the subsequent scenes try to evoke laughs through ugly and sexualised references to lower-status women who work in the house where a wedding is to soon happen — calling them ‘masaladosa’ (a food item, and masala means spice, of course) or ‘piece’, and playing on the word ‘madalasa’ which means ‘voluptuous’; the name ‘Thampi’ is mispronounced as ‘kambi’ (fuckstick); the father of the character played by Dileep, a ninety-year-old man, tries to pinch a woman servant’s bottom while another character tries to poke her shoulder. When Dileep’s character tries to pull his grandfather away, he says, “I haven’t been able to be with your grandmother enough…’ and then tries to press his hand on his grandson’s chest. All this is accompanied by the usual audio cue, the slightly-off-key twang sounds.

It is evident that women are the targets, not the audience, of such jokes. The Malayalam commercial cinema industry is deeply patriarchal and it relies on an even-more extensive patriarchal audience. Cinema is a collective effort, an industry. A very large number of people come together there for their livelihood or other reasons. They settle into lines of work, roles, mannerisms, and other actions that suit them best. These are encouraged collectively; as an industry, cinema must succeed. This is why the audience knows before seeing his movie, what a big star like, for example, Prem Nazir, will or will not do.

Those who make and see movies in Malayalam know pretty well what suits Dileep best. His forte is putrid, toxic, fart-like comedy laced with plenty of sexual allusions. Good enough to make adolescent boys giggle. Maybe this was kind of new in the early 2000s, but those who claim that his movies from back then were ‘innocent’ are those who enjoyed this brainless and fetid obscenity. Things have changed over the years, and this kind of comedy is rather outdated in present-day Kerala. However, such rotten stuff has been normal for some years now (through these movies) and there is a sizeable section which consumes it. Dileep’s backers in the movie industry also think that this fare is fine.

The latest Dileep movie Bha Bha Ba seems to be the same string of katta-jokes and valiccha wittu — as its reviews on You Tube indicate. One of these reviews points to something especially relevant to our discussion: in the movie, Dileep’s character kidnaps the Chief Minister of Kerala using a laxative drug. This drug is peculiar in that it takes an hour for the diarrhea to start. Like farting, pooping is also a major motif in Dileep’s comedy. It appears in Kalyanaraman as well. The character played by Dileep hands some coconut shavings to the character played by Innocent and says, “Let me feed Ganapathi first! Shouldn’t is all move freely?” Innocent’s character takes this immediately as an allusion to bowel movements and replies, “It’s all moving freely. I’ve had loose motions since two days now.” Dileep’s character responds: “Ok, just swallow the coconut shell and it will close down.”

Now, how long and how many can one entertain through jokes about going to the loo, pooping, farting, male erection, and rape? Well, the answer must be ‘quite a few’! Dileep and his minions have laughed all the way to the bank, many a time. The Dadasaheb Phalke award may have made its way to Kerala, but it is still possible to make the audience laugh with such indigestible material! It is still possible to rob the audience blind peddling venomous and brainless nonsense, on the pretext of lightness and laughter. But then, that is actually a statement about the cinema audiences in Kerala which seem so ready to gulp down juvenile, patriarchal rubbish.