I cannot stop myself from comparing Blake Edwards' "The Party" starring Peter Sellers to Mike Myers' "Love Guru".
The first time I saw The Party, I didn't even remember afterwards that Sellers was Indian; I was amazed by his performance of an awkward outsider, and the fact that he was a foreigner was lost to me (I was young and naive, I guess). Having seen it recently, I noticed that none of the jokes are about his "Indian-ness", quite on the contrary, we laugh at those "stuck up" party guests that treat him like an unwanted guest. The movie drives home the subject of embracing foreign cultures even more with not only some guests starting to like the Indian guest, but also when the guests from the Russian ballet come and cranks the party to the next level.
On the other hand, the Love Guru badly, very badly play with Indian stereotypes. It's simply not funny, especially after the tenth attempt at joking at it. Come to think about it, the characters have no depth, no development, the story has no depth nor meaning, and all of that is replaced by a nearly unlimited stream of poop and sex jokes.
Let's compare one element: The elephants. In The Party, the students use one elephant as a ridiculous prop for a protest. When they come crashing in the party, the Indian feels for the elephant, painted with slogans of all kind rather than being respected. So, the Indian convinces the students that they should wash up the elephant, which adds to the ongoing chaos that the party became. In Love Guru, two elephants have sex in a hockey stadium full of people. And it's not funny at all.
What I'm getting from this is an important point of writing "unusual" characters: They can exist beyond simple stereotypes and still be funny.
Published on December 1, 2012 at 21:18 EST
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