Why Sajid Khan films do well

It’s easy not to like Sajid Khan. While most directors/producers are at their agreeable best before their movie releases, he is exactly the opposite with his "my movies make more money than you can ever imagine, so take your opinions elsewhere” bluster. Whether Sajid Khan is truly as cocksure of his awesomeness as he appears to be or this is all part of a cultivated persona, I know not. But what I do know is that the reviews of Housefull 2, at least the ones I have read on the Net, have been almost universally savage.

What I also know, based on what the papers have told me, is that Housefull 2 has had a very good opening, second only to the mega-successful Agneepath. In a market where most movies are flops, this is rather an achievement. More so, since barring Akshay Kumar, none of the others in Housefull 2 are the type that can guarantee decent openings on their own. And Akshay Kumar is himself passing through a rather lean phase of his career. Which means that Sajid Khan might well have vindicated the rather overpowering confidence he has in his own abilities.

So how did he do it? Having seen Housefull 2 I can say that it lacks a coherent story and any kind of “character development” and appears to be just a sequential juxtaposition of silly, juvenile gags that include, but are not limited to, exaggerated facial contortions, crocodiles biting arses, scatological humor,  over-acting and dialogues of the “Langoor eat my angoor” type. This has led many shell-shocked audience-members to ask “What kind of people laugh at these jokes?”

Well, Indian audiences have always appreciated lowest-common-denominator humor and the success of Johnny Lever, in the ’80s and the ’90s, and several other comics whose routines weren’t exactly Wodehousian, is proof of it. The reason why Lever no longer works, nor for that matter movies like Naughty At Forty, is that, in this age of multiplexes and “Western sensibilities”, the wrapper around the turd gags needs to be classy. The biggest example of this classy packaging is Delhi Belly which had at its core a lot of flatulence, excreta and sex jokes, but came polished with the brush of “edginess” and “progressiveness” (“Look how far Hindi cinema has come, we are using mcs and bcs in our films”).  So effective was the arty image of Delhi Belly that anyone who did not like it was automatically derided by the crowd as being a philistine and a moron. (I had referred to this in an older edition of Crooked Corner as the “Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome”: if you don’t clap, you are the idiot).
 
Sajid Khan goes the other way. He makes trash even trashier.

Which is also why if you clap with it, you are the idiot.  Sajid uses retro Bollywood, something he knows a bit about, as the glue which holds the gags together. In doing so, he throws in every plot cliche and Bollywoodism that he can, precisely of the kind that he used to lampoon in his TV show, Kehne Main Kya Harj Hai — the warring brothers, the tenously improbable comedy of errors, the bachpan mein sagai, the crazy “vachan”s , the hyper-dramatic dacoits, the hat-tip to the hilarious Hindi-Italianism of Sujit Kumar’s Marconi from Great Gambler, the Joginder lota sequences, the servant-who-cannot-express-what-he-knows routine of Johnny Lever from his Baazigar Babulal days, the over-the-top hamming, Ranjeet’s iconic leering drawl and regrettably, retrogressive racist humour. For some, it is the familiarity of these devices (after all, we used to love such movies once upon a time), together with the juvenile brainlessness, that is appealing. For some (and I would count myself in this group), the fun is not so much the gags but the consistent retro references and the fact that the movie never takes itself seriously.

Now one may argue that I am over-analysing, that there is no design behind Housefull 2 and Sajid is no better than the worst of what he used to laugh at. That may well be true but for now Sajid is the one who is laughing. To the bank.

Arnab Ray is the author of The Mine and May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss