Hello, my name is Dustin Clue and I'm here today with Will Slown.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club, nothing but last November.

International month.

That's right.

So to reiterate the premise of this month, we're talking about comedy superstars from around the world who are hugely popular in their home country, often hugely popular in other parts of the world, but never crossed over to North America.

Woo!

Oh wait, wait, wait.

The comedy alarm is going off because we're speaking.

We picked wrong.

We picked wrong. Listen. we didn't pick a bad

subject no i want to be clear about this i'm happy that we're doing this yes but for years i heard

that raj kippur was india's charlie chaplain not a completely incorrect statement yes yes he is india's

charlie chaplain in a lot of ways except laughs yes although wait a. Maybe I shouldn't say that. The movies that we watched. Well, his movies, like so much of Indian cinema, are big buffets that have a lot of things in them. They have laughter, yes, but also tears. Also music. Also, a lot, a lot of melodrama. Yes. In addition to being the Charlie Chaplin of India,

he's been called the Clark Gable of India, which should tell you something about how much this doesn't

really fit into International Comedy Month. The movies that we watch, and I think, did we each

watch three? Yes. Yes. I mean, if we count lengths, we watched eight movies for this podcast. I would have watched more, but I'm sorry, there's only so much time. And I think that out of all the topics we're doing this month, this may be the one that we will skim the most gently on top of the water of like going into it. If you searched Raj Kapoor, because you were a huge fan, maybe you live in India. Okay, you're up to now. Man, Raj Kapoor's really great. Now you can turn it off. Yeah. This is what we think of him. We like Raj Kapoor. We like Raj Kapoor. But what you need to understand is we barely knew who we was a week ago. No. I knew of him. Well, yeah, I knew of him.

And actually checking the archives, it turns out I had actually seen one of his films

before.

Huh.

I'd seen Satyam Shivam Sundaram in 2021, and I liked it.

And these films, shockingly, they get almost no play in English language circles.

Which is remarkable because he's arguably the most important Indian filmmaker of all time.

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