As a child, I used to enjoy flipping through pages of the Limca Book of Records. There were the weirdest categories: longest moustaches, walking on hands, typing with noses. I always imagined that I could some day qualify by doing an outlandish feat that nobody else thought of. You must be wondering where this is going; who starts a review like this? Wonder no further (like the film at hand). The closest I’ve gotten to being in that book is today. The feat: watching a two-hour “laugh riot” without a single expression on my face. Forget chuckling, I think I anti-chuckled: minus-humour, if that’s a thing. Which surely must be some kind of record. The problem is I’m not the only participant. From the reactions in a cinema hall every other Friday, there’s plenty of competition. And there are sub-categories: watching a comedy without watching it (eyes glued to the phone), maximum yawns in a screening, most planted viewers to elicit reactions. I don’t know if I’ll win. As a film critic, though, I’m a strong contender.
If it isn’t evident yet, Pati Patni Aur Woh Do is brainrot comedy at its peak. I don’t mean that in a no-frills-fun way. A spiritual sequel to Pati Patni Aur Woh (2019), its brand of humour is aggressively juvenile. The theme is infidelity — sort of — so you know the writing is going to enter pre-teen-jokes territory and then call out its characters for having a dirty mind (it’s an Ayushmann Khurrana starrer: a last-ditch social message is par for the course). What else can explain introducing an effeminate, gay police constable as a gag? Or an obese boss who keeps fingering his own ears and extending handshakes as a gag? Or a woman in the passenger seat of a car leaning to pick up a vegetable and visually simulating oral sex to the man beside her? Or a girl whose sari comes undone when she falls into the arms of her male friend at the exact moment his wife notices them? Or a pun on a Muslim character named Nilofer: that “Nalli Nihari loafer”? Or a leopard getting caught only so that the hero can say it’s a female who encroaches on others’ territory? Or the word “kaan” (ear) being misheard as Hindi slang for posteriors (look at me acting all posh)? Or a shady hotel chain called ‘Moyo Rooms: Keep Coming’? At least the Govinda starrers in the 1990s managed to be funny while being a colourfully sexist product of its times. But movies like Pati Patni Aur Woh Do are neither.
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