A career doing stand-up comedy led to Mirani’s stint as a TV show host and a role as a Kashmiri cabbie in the film City of Life. Next on his agenda: Bollywood, if his spoof of India’s biggest film industry, on show in Toronto on Sunday, doesn’t get in the way.
The pitch: A 90-minute routine on the improbabilities of the Bollywood film biz, from clichéd song-and-dance routines to all those villainous mothers-in-law to the melodrama of the industry’s love stories. It’s the sort of fodder that’s popular at South Asian comedy nights, but unusual for TIFF Bell Lightbox, which tends to screen art house fare. Still, what better way to follow this summer’s tribute to Bollywood’s best-known showman Raj Kapoor than a spoof of the industry he helped create? Mirani’s challenge here was to elicit grins from fans who remember the vintage scenes he riffs off.
The payoff: Mirani didn’t save his best material for last. His opening got right to a favourite Bollywood trope: all those 70s films that start with shots of a hungry child stealing chappatis, the camera zooming in on his running legs – until, by the time the credits reveal the director’s name, a zoom out to reveal that those boyish legs have grown into, say, a grown-up Bollywood superstar like Amitabh Bachchan. He also successfully interspersed his Bollywood schtick with classic Bollywood clips, including a rib-tickling vignette from the 1982 comedy Namak Halaal in which, yes, Bachchan himself plays a village bumpkin interviewing for a staff position at a prestigious hotel, displaying his proficiency in English with verbal pyrotechnics. In fact, when Mirani couldn't get laughs on his own, the stars in his clips came to his rescue.
The downside: When Mirani wasn’t making fun of Bollywood, he put forward his own material – generally about sex, and including some groaners (the uncle whose broken English makes an innocuous date sound like a bad porn movie; puns built on Bollywood’s casting couch). Even when he was on track, Mirani’s Bollywood material had a few cringy moments, like his jokes about Bollywood’s relationship with homosexuality. After playing a clip from the film Dostana, where the stars pretend to be gay to lease an apartment, Mirani proceeded to list Bollywood movie titles that sounded “gay.” Any poking at Bollywood's attitude toward queer identity – which can veer from the stereotyped to the downright homophobic – was lost, unfortunately, the yuks mingled with a yuck response.
The bottom line: Mirani’s needs to build on his main theme – and, unlike the improv of Bollywood itself, flesh out his best bits.