From jokes about women’s bodies to female characters written mainly for comic relief, Bollywood’s comedy debate raises a bigger question: who gets to be funny, and who is expected to be laughed at?
A woman walks into a room, trips over something, eats too much, misunderstands a sexual joke or becomes the target of remarks about her body. The scene is supposed to be funny. But who is the joke actually for?
In Hindi cinema, comedy has often drawn on familiar stereotypes about women’s appearance, sexuality, relationships and social behaviour. Female characters may be present in a scene, yet their role is limited to provoking laughter rather than shaping the story through their own wit, personality or choices.
Actor Fatima Sana Shaikh has brought this imbalance into focus, arguing that women in comedy are frequently reduced to stereotypes and given little character development.
Speaking to Variety India in October while promoting her series Hunkkaar: The Roar, Shaikh criticised the reliance on women’s looks, sexuality and humiliation for laughs. She also pointed to a shortage of layered female comedy roles, praising performers such as Vidya Balan and Juhi Chawla for their comic abilities.
Her remarks raise an important question for the film industry: why should a woman’s appearance or embarrassment be an easier source of humour than her intelligence, ambition, contradictions or sense of mischief?
The issue is not whether comedy should be allowed to offend. It is whether women are given the same freedom as men to be funny, foolish, outrageous and imperfect without their bodies or identities becoming the entire joke.
When a woman’s body becomes the joke
Actor Anjali Anand’s experience offers a particularly revealing example of how appearance can determine the roles offered to women.
In a July 2026 interview with SCREEN, Anand said she believed her big-screen debut in Bell Bottom had been shaped by her body type rather than her acting ability. She described her role as one in which a terrorist falls on her and is caught.
Anand said plus-size women had often been written as comic-relief characters, with jokes revolving around eating or someone falling on them. She argued that such roles overlooked their ability to play characters with voices, personalities and meaningful storylines.
Her experience points to a distinction that is frequently missed in discussions about representation. A film can include a woman who does not fit conventional beauty standards without giving her meaningful representation. If her size is repeatedly used to generate laughter, inclusion can become another form of typecasting.
Anand’s role in Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani offered a different dimension. Her character, Gayatri, stands up against body-shaming remarks rather than existing merely as their target. Anand has described the role as significant, while also explaining that the visibility brought its own risk of being associated with a particular character type.
Her experience illustrates how difficult it can be for actors to escape the categories that casting and writing decisions establish around them.
The question is not whether a plus-size woman can be funny. She can be the funniest person in a film. The question is whether the humour comes from her personality and actions, or whether the film repeatedly asks audiences to laugh at her body.
That distinction matters for other women too. A character’s weight, age, skin colour, disability or appearance can be part of a story without becoming the only thing the audience is invited to notice.
Fatima Sana Shaikh’s criticism: Where are the layered female characters?
Shaikh’s criticism extends beyond body-shaming to the writing of comedy itself.
She has argued that female characters in the genre are often taken for granted and receive little opportunity to develop. In her view, women are too frequently made the subject of jokes about their looks, sexuality or humiliation.
Shaikh also expressed concern that contemporary entertainment offers fewer light-hearted projects in which performers can explore different kinds of characters.
She praised Vidya Balan’s comic timing and the work of Juhi Chawla, Madhuri Dixit and Preity Zinta, arguing that actresses in earlier decades had greater room to play varied characters.
Her observations do not establish that older Hindi cinema was free of sexism or that contemporary comedy always treats women poorly. Many older films also relied on restrictive gender roles. But the examples she identifies raise a useful question about the variety of comic characters available to women.
Can an actress be the central comic force in a story? Can she be absurd, selfish, awkward, manipulative or gloriously unreasonable without the script turning those qualities into a comment about women as a group?
The answer depends partly on how a character is written. Comedy becomes more interesting when a woman has her own motivations, makes mistakes, creates complications and drives the plot, rather than simply reacting to the antics of male characters.
The difference between laughing with a woman and laughing at her
Not every joke involving a woman’s appearance or behaviour is automatically sexist. Comedy often depends on embarrassment, exaggeration, physical mishaps and uncomfortable situations. Women can also knowingly use self-deprecating humour, and audiences do not necessarily interpret every joke in the same way.
The problem emerges when a pattern develops: a woman’s body is treated as inherently ridiculous, her sexual agency becomes an invitation to humiliate her, or her distress is used to entertain the audience without giving her character any meaningful perspective.
Consider the difference between two scenes.
In one, a plus-size character enters a room and the joke depends entirely on her weight, with other characters reacting to her body. In another, the same character uses sharp observations, challenges the room’s assumptions and delivers the funniest line.
Both scenes can produce laughter. Only the second gives the woman control over the comedy.
The same distinction applies to jokes about unmarried women, older women, mothers, women who express sexual desire and women who do not conform to conventional femininity.
A character can be ridiculous without being reduced to a stereotype. A woman can be the target of a joke without being stripped of agency. The writing determines whether the scene reveals something about an individual or simply repeats a familiar prejudice.
Women have already shown they can carry comedy
Hindi cinema has examples of women whose comic performances depend on character, timing and personality rather than simply making their appearance the punchline.
In Bhool Bhulaiyaa, Vidya Balan’s performance as Avni combines humour with the film’s psychological and dramatic elements. The character’s significance extends beyond being a source of comic reactions.
In Tumhari Sulu, Balan plays an ordinary middle-class woman whose unexpected opportunity as a radio host creates both humour and conflict. The comedy emerges from her ambitions, improvisation, family relationships and attempts to navigate unfamiliar territory.
Juhi Chawla’s comic performances have similarly drawn on timing, verbal exchanges and expressive character work. Such examples demonstrate that women need not be confined to supporting roles to contribute to comedy.
These films are not evidence that the industry has solved the problem. Rather, they illustrate the range of possibilities available when female characters have a story of their own.
The larger opportunity lies in allowing more women to occupy different comic roles: the lead who makes terrible decisions, the friend who steals every scene, the middle-aged woman with an irreverent sense of humour, the professional whose ambition creates chaos, or the antagonist whose wit makes her compelling.
Comedy need not make every female character admirable. It needs to let them be fully realised.
Who gets to decide what is funny?
The problem cannot be addressed through casting alone. Actors can bring intelligence and comic timing to a role, but they work within scripts, direction, editing and production decisions.
Writers determine what a character says and does. Directors decide how a scene is framed. Producers influence which stories are financed, while casting decisions determine which performers are considered suitable for particular roles.
If a script repeatedly relies on a woman’s weight, age or sexual humiliation to generate laughs, a talented actor may have limited room to change the underlying premise.
Greater diversity among writers and creative decision-makers could widen the range of experiences represented in comedy. But representation behind the camera is not enough by itself; the quality of the writing and the choices made in individual productions matter too.
There is also a commercial question. Filmmakers may continue to use familiar jokes because they believe audiences will recognise and respond to them. Challenging those assumptions requires giving audiences more opportunities to see women in varied comic roles, rather than treating existing formulas as the only route to success.
Viewers, meanwhile, can question why certain jokes work, which characters are allowed to deliver them and whose embarrassment is repeatedly turned into entertainment.
A better question for Bollywood’s next comedy
The debate sparked by Shaikh’s remarks is not about banning slapstick, eliminating irreverence or demanding that every female character be written as a role model.
It is about creative freedom—and whether women receive the same freedom to be complicated, funny and memorable as men.
Anjali Anand’s account shows what it can mean when an actor feels that her body determines the roles she is offered. Shaikh’s criticism points to a wider shortage of layered female characters in comedy. Their experiences invite the industry to examine not just who appears on screen, but what those characters are permitted to do.
A woman should be able to make an audience laugh because she is witty, chaotic, sharp-tongued, ridiculous or brilliantly flawed. Her body can be part of her character, but it should not automatically become the joke.
The real test for Hindi cinema is not whether women can perform comedy. Their performances have answered that question repeatedly.
It is whether writers and filmmakers are willing to give women characters worth laughing with, rather than repeatedly asking audiences to laugh at them.
