My favourite comedian: Mehmood saheb

I would like to pay a brief tribute to my most favourite comedian Mehmood saheb. He was a wonderful comedic actor who worked in many Hindi movies in India especially in the 1960s and 1970s.

I have always liked comedians or comedic actors such as Asrani, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Johnny Lever, etc. I also liked comedians who have talk shows such as Conan O’Brien and Kapil Sharma or who are on youtube as well as other platforms such as Vir Das and Prajakta Koli. I think comedians make our lives a little less stressful. They make us happy from time to time. However, my most favourite comedian of all time has to be Mehmood saheb.

He worked in many movies but I will go over a few of my most favourite ones: Sadhu aur Shaitan, Padosan and Bombay to Goa.

Sadhu and Shaitan has to be one of my all time favourite movies. In it Mehmood plays a cab driver with a heart of gold. He is very close to the family of a nice man who later gets embroiled in a crime with few dangerous people. Mehmood not only is the comedian in the movie but he is the romantic lead as well. He has a nice romance with the heroine who is a teacher to some young children. Mehmood has many funny scenes in the movie with acting stalwarts such as Om Prakash and Pran. This movie has a few guest appearances as well including that of Sunil Dutt, Dilip Kumar, Mumtaz and Kishore Kumar. Mehmood’s interactions with these actors are very funny as well. He has a few song sequences in the movies which are very nice. His dialogue delivery and mannerisms make the audience laugh a lot. Towards the end of the movie there is a scene in which he is on top of an ice slab and is coming down a steep road in Mumbai in the summer. It is one of the most hilarious scenes I have ever seen.

Padosan is one of my favourite movies as well. Starring Sunil Dutt and Saira Banu it has a nice romance but a lot of comedy as well. Mehmood plays ‘Master ji’, a music teacher to Saira’s character. He is very funny in his dialogues as well as mannerisms. He is a romantic rival to Sunil’s character. Although he has less screen time than the the other actors it is always a treat to see him on the screen and the audience waits for his scenes. His scenes with Kishore Kumar are also hilarious as well. The song ‘Ek Chatur Naar Badi Hoshiyar’ is picturized on most of the cast but Mehmood acts so well in it that he overshadows the others. It is also a wonderful song and a testament to the wonderful singing prowess of the great playback singers who sang the song, Kishore Kumar and Manna Dey. I have seen Padosan at least three times in the last 15 years and love watching it, especially because of Mehmood’s top notch performance.

Bombay to Goa is a nice movie. It is very funny as well. Mehmood produced the movie and was the main comedic actor in it. It boasts of a wonderful ensemble cast including Amitabh Bachchan as the protagonist and Shatrughan Sinha as the antagonist. Aruna Irani is very nice as the young heroine in the movie. Mehmood plays the bus conductor of a bus that is travelling from Bombay to Goa with many passengers. Most of the passengers are very funny characters. Mehmood’s scenes with the bus driver (who is his brother Anwar in real life), Amitabh, Aruna, Shatrughan and the rest of the cast are very funny. His dialogue delivery is very good and his mannerisms are hilarious. It seems that he had a great time playing the role of a jolly bus conductor in the movie. When he speaks Mumbai Hindi in the movie the audience would have been in splits. His comedic acting enhances the overall impact of the movie for sure.

Thank you very much, Mehmood saheb, for your wonderful performances in such nice movies over the years. You have made millions of people in India and across the world smile and laugh through your work and for that a lot of us fans (including myself) will always be grateful.