Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos

The directorial debut of Vir Das and Kavi Shastri, Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos, introduces us to Happy—played by Das himself—a 34-year-old, UK-based wannabe secret agent whose most dangerous skill is assembling a sandwich so good it brings joy to his British dads. He is earnest, clumsy, and armed with optimism rather than competence. Naturally, chaos follows. Written by Vir Das and Amogh Ranadive, the 121-minute film operates on hope—hope that a goofy British spy of Indian origin can carry a full-blown absurdist comedy. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it really, really hopes it works.

Comedy is serious business – and not everybody can get that right. The gags could be physical (think of ‘thoda khao thoda pheko’, in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, (1983) or any Bustor Keaton, Charlie Chaplin film), situational like Chupke Chupke (1975) or a Golmaal (1979) that got everything right. Then we had the Kadar Khan Shakti Kapoor comedy in the 80s & 90s and Aamir Khan Productions own Delhi Belly (2011) had some funny situations.

Twenty minutes into Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos, I was reminded of a question someone asked me around the Golden Globes recently: “How did One Battle After Another win in the Musical/Comedy category? There were no songs and there wasn’t any comedy.” While I chuckled then, watching Vir Das and Kavi Shastri’s film made me re-realize his perception of comedy. Happy Patel is set in a satirical world with a nice lineup of eccentric characters and even weirder events. Somehow, the filmmakers are hell-bent on making us laugh in a Bollywood-comedy sort of manner. Which is why, it was awkward when Happy Patel could not make me laugh. Not even once. It was like your younger sibling trying to tickle you in childhood, only to fail miserably. I may have smiled a couple of times here and there, notably during the climax. That was it.

It’s all there, but not quite. Vir Das, known primarily for his stand-up comedy, co-directs (with Kavi Shastri) and co-writes (with Amogh Ranadive) Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos,which starts on a promising note, but the chaos and the humour that come along with it runs its course midway through the film. I was seated when the film began, which showed Aamir Khan as a dreaded gangster in Goa’s fictitious Panjore out on a killing spree and engaging in a gun fight with two British agents.

I wonder if Vir Das was a fan of Scrubs. So much in Happy Patel reminded me of Zach Braff’s sitcom: the cutaways and inserts, the sheer number of throwaway gags, the gravitation towards sweetness and light. This sort of busy, packed, self-aware comedy has a robust tradition in American film and TV. But we don’t see it much in India—which makes Happy Patel a bit of a curiosity, as foreign-returned as its protagonist.