Musical spoofs

If you search for Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” on YouTube, chances are you’ll end up watching a bunch of spoofs starting from “I Kicked a Girl” to “I Kissed a Vampire, Dog, Boy, Dude, Frog or Nerd”. “I make fun of myself more than they [did]” is what the pop star has to say for the home versions of her hit single.

Most popular artists have been spoofed. Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” and Miley Cyrus’ “When You Look at Me” are among some other most popular parodies online, indicating the growing trend of funny home productions spoofing music celebrities.

Making fun of musicians on TV shows is nothing new, but the amateur versions of their videos have been given an outlet on YouTube.

For Pakistani viewers, the 1980s comedy show “Fifty Fifty” pioneered spoofs of local and foreign singers.

Ismail Tara’s skit parodying Michael Jackson (“Disco Chor”) and Bushra Ansari’s comic versions of Mallika Pukhraj and Mussarat Nazir’s songs became as popular as the originals.

Decades after parodying others, Ansari was herself spoofed by comedian and actor Veena Malik.

But home productions of spoofs may also be picking in Pakistan.

Arif Lohar and Meesha Shafi’s duet on Coke Studio, “Alif Allah” is undoubtedly one of the most popular songs this year. In the same way that “Alif Allah” has been posted repeatedly on social networking websites, another video has gained its own share of popularity. It’s a home video of a group of friends parodying the Shafi-Lohar song. Uploaded on July 6, the video has already pulled in 59,000 views on YouTube.

The video features a fake ‘Arif Lohar’ with a wig. To stay true to character, the fake Lohar keeps playing a small-sized chimtaa.  Complementing Lohar is ‘Shafi’, played by a guy with heavy eye make-up and a jacket. While it is not an exact copy of Shafi’s performance, the character incessantly rolls his eyes during the performance.

The last popular spoof of a music video was the song “Rubberband”, which featured Ahmed Ali Butt and Vasay Chaudhry. But “Alif Allah’s” parody, despite its simplicity, has surpassed any other recent spoof done in Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 20^th, 2010.