Kabhi Khushi Kabhi gay: Not Arjun or Ranveer, the real roast on AIB Knockout was Karan Johar

Once upon a time you could come out by sitting the parents down and saying “Mother, father I don’t want to marry.” Or you could come out by being Ashok Row Kavi and having your picture in yet another cookie-cutter story about India’s hidden gay community since everyone else in the story only wanted to appear in silhouette. But now you can appear on All India Bakchod. The All India Bakchod roast was supposed to be about Arjun Kapoor and Ranveer Singh. And there were digs at Simi Garewal’s dildo and Raghu Ram’s mother. But it was really Karan Johar being rotiserried. Gaily. Karan Johar has had a long career in Bollywood. He’s gifted us with many films well worth roasting. He’s hosted a chatty television show that can be spoofed to queendom come. He’s acted. He’s directed. He’s produced. He’s more roast-worthy than most of the other turkeys running around Bollywood. [caption id=“attachment_2070045” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Courtesy: Youtube[/caption] But pretty much the only thing the AIB gang finds funny about Karan Johar seems to be his sexuality. He was introduced as the gay cliché.

A pilot, a sailor, an actor, a model, an architect are all men he would happily fuck . Please welcome to the stage Karan Johar.

And then he was promptly smooched by Ranveer Singh who said to the crowd “Don’t be shocked. I’ve been doing more than that to him for 4 years. He still won’t cast me in a fucking movie.” Sooner or later every comedian on that show doubled back to the gay joke.

I’d like to thank the entire panel for coming out today. And Karan for not. Aditi, all your jokes are male bashing. You are sort of like Karan Johar after a breakup. Karan is a director, producer, writer, actor. You are like 4 guys in one - exactly how you like it. Parineeti Chopra is not here because we told her she would get fucked by 10 dudes in front of 4000 people. (Mild gasp and titters from the audience) Karan is here tonight because we told him he’d get fucked by 10 dudes in front of 4000 people. (Wild cheers)

We’ve come a long way from the nudge-nudge wink-wink Kanta-behn jokes, baby. Karan Johar could have been offended and refused to play along. Rituparno Ghosh once famously ripped into the comedian Mir for his caricatures of him. When you mimic me are you mimicking me or are you mimicking an effeminate man?” asked Rituparno. When Mir replied he was just imitating Rituparno Ghosh and only Rituparno Ghosh, Ghosh refused to let him off the hook. “But what is the message?” asked Rituparno. “Are people seeing Rituparno Ghosh or a naari-shulabh purush (effeminate man)?…Have you ever thought that whenever you mimic me, so many effeminate men in Kolkata, in Bengal feel ashamed, feel humiliated?” Could gay men have been offended with Family Guy filmmaker Karan Johar being reduced to the Family Gay? Possibly. Could AIB have dared to out a top notch Bollywood hero in the same way? Probably not. Would it have been as funny if two avowedly hetero men like Anurag Kashyap and Vishal Dadlani were camping it up with feather boas and corsets as they did in that “sex tape” in Happy New Year? No. What worked was instead of laughing at gays or our feather-boa-ed idea about gays, this was potty humor where gay sex and straight sex finally got equal billing. Someone could stand on the same stage and joke to gasps that the last good thing Ranveer Singh was in was Deepika Padukone AND that Karan Johar’s films have big openings just like him! Pow! You can call it a race to the bottom when it comes to taste but KJo came out on top and proved to be quite versatile – giving as good as he got. When Ranveer Singh knelt on the floor offering his butt to Karan for a role, Karan sashayed off to the mic and sniffed “That’s my position, Ranveer.” This might have been all fun and games and not meant to be taken seriously but it’s a sea change from the parlour games around sexuality KJo usually plays like on that famous chat with Simi Garewal where he was alleged to be clearing up the air about those gay rumours.

KJO: You think I am up to tricks when I travel? SG: I think you have your relationships abroad. KJO: You think I have my relationships abroad? Ok, so should I give you a straight face? SG: Hainaa? I think this Gemini twin that you talk about. One twin is abroad and one is here…

Gay finally stopped being another three-letter synonym for coy thanks to AIB. Karan Johar has still never said whether he’s gay or not. And he should never have to. Or as someone put it on the roast the only way he would ever come out if Jaya Bachhan was standing outside the closet with a thali. But at this point it does not matter anymore. Life does not have to be about coming out. And if the angst spilling out of that short film he did for Bombay Talkies is any indication, Karan Johar as the celebrity activist spokesperson for the LGBT cause would probably be insufferably tedious. He probably did the cause more good by his risque turn on All India Bakchod than any sermon he could give at a Pride March. As Nandini Ramnath points out on Scroll “The event proves that all comedy is, at the end of the day, deadly serious.” As he laughed as he was roasted, Karan Johar seems to have finally realized that he can actually be kabhi khushi, kabhi gay and no one effing cares. And he did it all with his mother in the front row. AIB might have been roasting two hot young stars but it’s Karan Johar who came out as Special K.