How Vivekh redefined comedy in Tamil cinema

He tapped themes like arrival in the big city with terrific comic timing

I will begin with two memories. The first begins with a somewhat singular leg and a steel crutch.

This entrance is followed by the rest of a most beauteous ensemble: a moustachioed vision in a fluorescent Lungi, a carelessly-knotted but elegant tie, and cool shades, singing the lines ‘I’m a beggar boy, you have to give me paisa’ to the tune of Aqua’s Barbie Song.

In the next moment, you have a plausible back story thrown at you at top speed. The other leg went dubuk in a 1988 air crash, and our man has been begging to go to Jaipur to pay for an artificial limb. He has a little notebook into which you can write your address, for he plans to run in the Olympics after Jaipur, and will pay everybody back.

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In the next two breaths, he dispatches a ten-paise alms-giver who asks too many questions by flinging a rupee at him, and reminding him that all those who gave their money to finance companies without so many questions are now at Panagal Park, and then shocks a kindly old man into a dead faint by truthfully answering a question about what he does when he gets tired of standing on one leg.

This is my earliest memory of the comedian Vivekh, from the Tamil film ‘Vaalee’ (1999), and to remember this moment is to remember all those nitrogen bubbles that went the wrong way up my nose and into my head.

In the 2002 film ‘Run’, Vivekh arrives in Chennai from Srirangam, hoping to meet hometown boy Madhavan. His trajectory through the big city is in diametric contrast to the squeaky-clean Savarna world that Madhavan moves through.

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It is, despite his constant displays of worldly wisdom and street-smarts, a constant falling through the gaps, featuring the loss of luggage, address-book, purse, the clothes he is wearing, a kidney, and various affronts to dignity such as a cawing fit after a mysterious biriyani, a purificatory bath in the Cooum, and an insertion into the sets of a soft-porn film.

When we leave him, the sight of him throwing cow dung at a Welcome to Chennai sign wins him public acclaim as a Siddha savant, and he wakes up to a new opportunity at this moment with the words ‘Yatho Yatho Kawasaki, Atho Atho Mitsubishi’.

These two moments illustrate Vivekh’s ability to reach deep into the demotic of our time and into stray bits of popular culture to find and yoke the undocumented myths of our time in intricately written but whirlwind-energy comedic runs.

Vivekh and his other great contemporary, Vadivel, reinvented comedy in Tamil cinema in the post-liberalisation years, each tapping into an individual vein of experience and mining thus into anxieties about social mobility, the idea of arrival in the big city and resulting success, and the different panics around English, those that arise from knowing it, and those that arise from not having any.

The comedian in Tamil cinema traditionally occupies the other end of masculinity from the hero. This spectrum of bro-sociality offers us the possibility of a laconic hero, and a talky sidekick/comedian, and regrettably, a very restricted space for femininity.

Vivekh, in his heyday, had a talent for addressing some of these anxieties. He will be remembered for the throwaway line ‘Thottaalum jeyichalum, meesaya murukku’ ( ‘Whether you win or lose, remember to twirl your moustache’), and just as much for making failure something that people could laugh about.

He began as Vivekanandhan from Sankaran Kovil, who went to American College, Madurai to Commerce, and was so noted for his sharp comments that a Tamil professor asked him why he didn’t use the talent constructively. This nudged him into writing for theatre, into an interest in writing and performance that came together to give him an apprenticeship with K Balachander, and then his remarkable career, and the parallels comparing him to that other master of cultural comment, NS Krishnan.

There was occasionally some unscripted comedy in his life. I once barely survived watching an interview he did with the great 'fail-rani' of Tamil cinema, Khushboo, who is a failure because she went from defending sexual agency for women fifteen years ago to becoming a rightwing megaphone.

In that interview, she asks him about his famous namesake. He seemed rather dazed by that great man’s brilliance in predicting that India would become free in fifty years, and said that things were so much better then, essentially cancelling the justice movements of the last century.

Nevertheless, I can forgive him this moment because he was once a young man from a small town, and never lost his earnestness about trying to live up to a public role.