Aneez Bazmee’s Welcome (2007) would air every Thursday night on the same television-channel for the greater part of my childhood. This classic Bollywood film is a comedy-of-errors that foretells a pure-hearted man’s unintentional dalliance with steely dons, battling mafias, and the ominous world of organized crime—however, this although accurate description simply doesn’t do justice to the distinct tone of the film. Welcome (2007) exists in the greater continuity of Hindi cinema, particularly belonging to a cycle that begun at the turn-of-the-century. This canon of screwball films relies on labyrinthine set-ups and mistaken identities, spinning an overwrought web of galat fehmis, which can be loosely translated from the original Hindi to illustrate a series of unfortunate misunderstandings. That is why, by the 3rd hour of this film’s runtime, the ensuing chaos you are about to witness still produces a guttural laugh in my belly. It isn’t because of the schadenfreude of the slapstick—it is because the awkwardness of the dramatic irony is finally being revealed to the film’s motley characters.
Gunning distinguishes mischief gags from narrative cinema by emphasising their structures of interruption, which disrupt the film’s linear narrative. The comedy often arises from an abrupt interjection within the text or a subversion of the diegesis’s natural order. He insists, “The narrative is the propelling element… the gags are the potholes, detours, and flat tires”. However, I believe this to be incorrect of the climactic sequence of Welcome (2007), which frames the resolution of the film’s endless misunderstandings through the visual gag of a house-on-stilts that is about to fall, while a deadly children’s game is played in the room above. Whilst the scene in its entirety isn’t available to watch on YouTube, I want to emphasise that Hindi cinema has often been described by its scholars as a “cinema of interruptions”, which instead of creating forking paths that are never reconciled with each other, construct deliberately elaborate gags that neatly tie up the strings of the gags that came before it. The explosive interruption of the Don’s house collapsing into the hills isn’t an external force in the narrative, as Gunning describes. It is instead the narrative’s act of resolving the karmic balance, restoring the character’s morals, and giving reason to the absurd gags of the film.