Yesterday we went to see a Pakistani stage play \u2018monkey business\u2019 written and directed by Yasir Hussain being shown these days at Karachi Arts Council.<\/p>\n
Yasir indeed did a great job and has proved once again that he is an amazing artist. The name \u2018Monkey Business\u2019 might have been intrigued him from a movie of yore of the same name, but he has effectively created a relevance of the content with the name.<\/p>\n
Yasir played several roles in this play, the protagonist, his father and his wife. While playing as father of the protagonist he tried to mimic Amitabh Bachchan which was quite unnecessary even for the purpose of creating comedy because the play was already well written and had ample substance to make the audience laugh.<\/p>\n
In all the three characters he performed very well undoubtedly and has been quite successful in engaging the audience throughout.<\/p>\n
All the performers, mainly Yasir himself, Umer Aalam and Yusra Irfan did justice to their characters. Because of being from Lahore Karachi theatre and its comedy could never tickle me enough to make me laugh. Lahoriites have a peculiar sense of humour; subtle but based on very deep observation of human behaviours in ordinary settings. Karachi has indeed produced its own legends in comedy who created their imprints all over Pakistan.<\/p>\n
Monkey Business is an exception in that it connected well with the people regardless of their ethnic tendencies. Yasir did quite outdo himself to create some potent humour and made the audience laugh continuously throughout the play.<\/p>\n
The only thing that has creeped in our comedy landscape lately and has become a tradition now is slapping at someone\u2019s face, who is to be mocked at or made fun of, with a punchline thereby creating a hilarious situation.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, Yasir too has allowed himself to be carried away by this irritatingly humiliating tradition. Though the slaps used in Monkey Business were kept lighter as against those used in Punjabi theatre which are usually really hard ones to give original effects at the cost of the poor artist. I mean why do we need to physically humiliate someone so grossly to make others laugh.<\/p>\n
In earlier days when Amanullah and Suhail Ahmed like legends were performing there were no such things. Their legacy is different. This kind of violence was never used to make the audience laugh. The performance and dialogues should be made powerful enough to create the effect the director and writer want to create without resorting to these demeaning tools.<\/p>\n
Is it necessary to embarrass the school going children of the artists and their families who are being belittled just to make people laugh? Comedy can be situational or witty and, in my view, there is enough room in both to create humour without hurting human dignity of some artist.<\/p>\n
This article is written by Muhammad Akram Sawleh. The writer is a lawyer by profession.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday we went to see a Pakistani stage play \u2018monkey business\u2019 written and directed by Yasir Hussain being shown these days at Karachi Arts Council. Yasir indeed did a great job and has proved once again that he is an amazing artist. The name \u2018Monkey Business\u2019 might have been intrigued him from a movie of yore of the same name, […] More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":439514,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2506,2494,2560],"tags":[],"adace-sponsor":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-439512","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-actors","8":"category-art","9":"category-theater"},"wps_subtitle":"","img_urls":{"thumbnail":["https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Monkey-Business-364x205.jpg",364,205,true],"medium":["https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Monkey-Business.jpg",1280,720,false],"full":["https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Monkey-Business.jpg",1280,720,false]},"author_name":"Guest Author","categories_name":["Actors","Art","Theater"],"title_text":"\u2018Monkey Business\u2019: A Witty Ride with Unnecessary Slips","related_stories":"https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts?filter&per_page=4&categories=2506,2494,2560&exclude=439512","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439512\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439512"},{"taxonomy":"adace-sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/propakistani.pk\/lens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/adace-sponsor?post=439512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}