Laughter Challenge:

Purane jokes aur nahi (No more old jokes). That's precisely what The Great Indian Laughter Challenge 3 had promised. Unfortunately, for the first time, this promise was broken in Friday's episode. The offender was none other than aamchi Mumbai's Vinod Kumar, who'll compete with fellow Mumbaikar Rahman for the final wild card tonight. Apparently, Vinod recycled one of Johnny Lever's famous jokes on martial arts. It goes likes this "A person requests his martial arts teacher to brief him on Kung-fu. The master replies Kung-fu is very easy to learn. If you ever confront a kung-fu expert, just look to your right and then look to your left. Whichever way is near to you, run in that direction." The not-so-wily Vinod replaced kung-fu with karate and pitched in his own characters but couldn't hide his theft. Not only did he recite Johnny's joke, the Mumbaikar repeated one of his item that he uttered in the preliminary round. The item in question is as follow. A man hurts himself but is afraid to embarrass himself by crying in public. However, when the pain is unbearable, he breaks down. The content isn't humourous but the manner in which Vinod expresses it is indeed funny. Sadly, he was a bit two wise for himself. Surprisingly, our astute judges, Shekhar Suman and Navjot Singh Sidhu , maintained silence over it. This, after we saw them in promos where they chided ' naye jokes; naya talent... jeete toh inaam warna qatle-aam' (New jokes; new talent …if you win, you'll get rewarded or else get killed) Director Pankaj Saraswat defended the act saying "I too am aware of this. However, I'd like to state that we've shot over 150 hours and it's probably for the first time someone has erred. We religiously indulge into measures where we make it a point that there is no repetition of content". He defended the judges too stating that the two of them have been associated with the show for three seasons and thus it isn't possible for them to spot these errors every time. The judges were unavailable for comment. Before signing off, Pankaj assured us that such act wouldn't be repeated in keenly contested semi-finals and the final. TGILC has proved to be stress buster for Indians and so one should have the bigness of heart to forgive them