Kapil Sharma has been facing intense backlash over the past few days for seemingly making a joke about filmmaker Atlee’s appearance on his comedy show, The Great Indian Kapil Show. And the comedian is in no mood to take it. He has requested people to watch the whole episode before jumping to a conclusion. Also read: Chinmayi Sripaada slams Kapil Sharma for ‘racist jibes’ on Atlee: ‘This is not surprising’
The comment
On Saturday, Atlee was seen in the episode of The Great Indian Kapil Show along with Baby John actors Varun Dhawan, Keerthy Suresh and Wamiqa Gabbi. In one segment, Kapil is seen asking Atlee, “When you get to meet a star for the first time, do they ask, where is Atlee?”
Responding to Kapil, Atlee said, “In a way I understood your question. I’ll try to answer. I’m actually very thankful to AR Murugadoss sir because he produced my first film. He asked for a script, but he didn’t see how I was looking or whether I’m capable of it or not. But, he loved my narration. I think the world should see that. We should not judge by appearance. You have to judge by your heart.”
This didn’t go down well among several social media users, who found it offensive and dubbed it as a racist comment.
Kapil reacts
On Tuesday, Kapil took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to react to the ongoing stir. He responded to the buzz while re-posting a tweet which read, “Kapil Sharma subtly insults Atlee’s looks? Atlee responds like a boss: Don’t judge by appearance, judge by the heart”. The post had a clip of the conversation of the duo from the web show.
Reacting to it, Kapil wrote, “Dear sir, can you pls explain me where n when I talked about looks in this video ? pls don’t spread hate on social media (folded hand emoji) thank you. (guys watch n decide by yourself, don’t follow any body’s tweet like a sheep)”.
This is the first time that Kapil has reacted to the criticism that he had been getting for the joke.
What were the fans saying
Ever since the episode released on Netflix on Saturday, the world of social media was divided with several users expressing their disappointment about the joke.
“Maybe be his intention was not that but then he should have framed the question in much much better way. But all in all he is a champion of body shaming so not surprising at all,” one user wrote, with another mentioning, “Kapil Sharma may be a nice person otherwise, but he makes racist/sexist/body shaming/homophobic jokes all the time on his show. His silly question to Atlee reflects the fair-skin colour obsession of North Indians”.
Singer Chinmayi Sripaada also joined in, and wrote, “Will they never stop these crass and racist jibes at his skin colour in the name of ‘comedy’? Someone with the amount of influence and clout like Kapil Sharma saying something like this is disappointing and unfortunately, not surprising.”
Meanwhile, Atlee is yet to respond to the stir.