As dramatic as it sounds, no one can deny the fact that Tamil cinema has been going through a severe drought of quality comedies in the last few years. An argument could be made that the source of the problem can be traced to our obsession with rhyme schemes. For some reason, our filmmakers and comedians seem to think that a joke is funny just because it rhymes or of it repeats a word.
“Unakku life prachana, enakku piles prachana,” says Yogi Babu, in the opening scene of Jolly O Gymkhana. It is not that we want Yogi Babu’s health condition to add value to the plot or that it is an inappropriate subject matter to make jokes out of. It is hard for the audience to find fault in anything when they are laughing through a scene. However, with Jolly O Gymkhana, where the jokes don’t work, all we get are floating set-ups which doesn’t make any sense.
The film borrows the popular trope from films like Weekend at Bernie’s where the central characters make others believe that a corpse is alive. Interestingly, instead of milking the trope dry, director Sakthi Chidambaram connects it with several other subplots.
Madonna Sabastian’s Bhavani is trying to save her family’s restaurant from being destroyed by the loan sharks, a group of politicians are involved in a large-scale scam, John Vijay’s police officer must prove his innocence, a group of assassins are on the loose, and Prabhu Deva’s lawyer character brings along his own set of conflicts.
While it might seem like a chaotic mess of plot conveniences at first, the subplots are surprisingly cohesive. The one discordant portion is the plot thread involving Yogi Babu, a priest who listens to Madonna Sabastian’s confessions, a painfully obvious exposition tool.
The best part of the film is when Prabhu Deva springs back to life in an imaginary song sequence, where the ace choreographer gets to flex his skills. On the contrary, we struggle to understand why a director like Sakthi Chidambaram, who is known for popular comedies like Englishkaran, Maha Nadigan, and Charlie Chaplin, seems to be struggling to crack even one joke in this film.
At one moment in Jolly O Gymkhana, we see a comedy scene from the director’s own Kovai Brothers on TV, as if to remind us what he was once capable of. The director relentlessly tries to win us over with every line of dialogue being an attempt at a joke. But the dialogues come out as vague ideas of a punchline instead of a fully-formed joke. After ending a phone call, Madonna’s character realises that the phone is dead.
While we wonder why she makes it a point to note this right after the end of the call, Abirami’s Chellama goes, “Idhuvum dead ah.” The punchlines serve to explain that the completely random moment we just witnessed is a set-up for a joke. These punchlines act like a self-cleaning mechanism, clearing up confusion created by the film in the first place.
They do this more than they elicit laughter. This happens a lot until we realise that Jolly O Gymkhana is a string of repetitive moments where we go, “What just happened?” followed by “Oh, that was supposed to be a joke.”
With the botched execution of Jolly O Gymkhana, it is obvious that Sakthi Chidambaram has erroneously believed that an insincere effort was the right attitude to make a lighthearted comedy. This is all the more apparent with the film’s hard-to-ignore lip-sync issues. Almost, every single dialogue, from the first scene, to the very last scene, seems to be ad-libbed. If these are the dialogues they chose to replace, then it is terrifying to imagine what the original lines might have been.
Directors: Sakthi Chidambaram
Cast: Prabhu Deva, Madonna Sebastian, Abhirami, John Vijay