From Aamir Khan to Gulzar, Sunil Grover is redefining the art of imitation

Have you watched Sunil Grover play Aamir Khan?

Week after week, Sunil Grover deconstructs a celebrity on The Great Indian Kapil Show (Netflix). In the latest episode, Grover, dressed as Aamir Khan in a printed kurta, harem pants and a hairband, doesn’t merely play “perfectionist” or parrot a catchphrase. He is instead after the blinking eyes, the beatific half-smile that looks like it has been vetted by focus-groups, the way Khan leans forward as he speaks, as if test-screening his own sentence.

Khan himself has refused to call it mimicry, praising the act as “so authentic” he felt he was watching himself, saying he laughed so hard he couldn’t breathe. That is the highest praise: the original reduced to a giggling audience member, confronted with a mirror—a mirror that has better comic timing.

Traditional mimicry is about cloning, the instant ta-da of a familiar sound emerging from an unfamiliar face. You can find hundreds on Instagram, some cleverer than others, some even aided by artificial intelligence.

Grover, instead, creates an image out of micro-impressions, the tiny hyper-specificities that separate imitation from caricature. A great impressionist, like a great cartoonist, picks three or four details and exaggerates them just enough to redraw the entire person. The legendary American mimic Rich Little once described impressions as “picking a lock with one bobby pin,” while cartoonist Al Hirschfeld spoke of finding “the one line that is the key to a face.”

Grover carries many bobby pins at once. A Khan tilt of the head, yes, but also the slightly over-earnest clasping of hands when talking about cinema, the way a sentence is chewed thoughtfully before being released as if it has finally passed quality control. These are things audiences recognise instantly even if they had never consciously clocked them before.

If the Khan bit illustrates a star’s self-conscious myth-making, Grover’s take on Gulzar underlines his true audacity. On the Independence Day special last year, he walked on to The Great Indian Kapil Show wrapped in the classic Gulzar whites, bespectacled, taking the podium as the poet would. The visual detailing is immaculate—the kurta-pyjama, the age-appropriate stoop, the fussy neatness of a man who treats a fold in his sleeve like a typo—but the kill-shot lies in the pauses between the shaayari.

Grover chews the words the way Gulzar does, tasting them before sharing, letting them cling to the tongue in little ellipses of silence and sigh. There’s the poetic exhale, yes, but also the faintly exasperated inhalation, the sense of a master mildly annoyed that language still isn’t good enough.

True impressions reveal the subconscious choreography behind a public self. The poet seems more poet, the star more star, because the impressionist has underlined the italics.

Great impressions redefine the original. Like Jaaved Jaaferi who used music countdown shoes to launch into zany and brilliant impressions, Grover doesn’t stop at the obvious. He has turned Salman Khan into a series of preening shrugs and Amitabh Bachchan into a language of apologetic gravitas and lower-lip bites. When he went after Navjot Singh Sidhu, he nailed not merely the booming laugh but the self-amused nodding, that look of a man forever applauding his own punchline.

Years ago, young Sunil Grover auditioned randomly when satirical legend Jaspal Bhatti visited his college in Chandigarh. He didn’t think he did well, but astute satirist Bhatti spotted something, and later sent a team member to fetch the boy who didn’t have a mobile phone. Soon Grover was playing assorted roles in Flop Show and Full Tension, absorbing, as understudies often do, just how sharply a gag needs to be whittled, in order to land.

Then came stage shows, radio comedy (Hansi Ke Phuware), and the restless grind of a jobbing comic, until the big leap: national fame as “Gutthi” on Comedy Nights with Kapil and, later, as one of the principal attractions of The Kapil Sharma Show. As a starstruck young girl, Gutthi was an impressionist’s manifesto—the gait, the snort-laugh, the offbeat clapping—a character constructed out of behavioural underlining.

A much-publicised fallout with Kapil Sharma in 2017 ejected Grover from the variety show into shows and films, where he did fine work (like in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Pataakha) but never found a stage for his shapeshifting.

All that has changed. Grover is now the highlight of The Great Indian Kapil Show. It barely matters what Kartik Aaryan or Ananya Panday are flogging, or what Kapil Sharma is asking. I tune in only for Grover embodying some new prey, miraculously and frequently defying physicality. Look up his Ajay Devgn, his Mithun Chakraborty, and even his Allu Arjun.

It is said about those that do impressions that they do not copy the voice, but the soul. The best of them are therefore emotional plagiarists, lifting not the text of a performer but his nerves and tics. Sunil Grover has become that rare artist whose imitations feel like original works. On a stage full of celebrities trying hard to be themselves, the most compelling presence is the one man pretending, all too precisely, to be somebody else. Everyone is impressed by the right impressionist. Copy that.

Streaming Tip Of The Week:

A truly bizarre impression is a memorably thing, and I remember being bowled over by Iliza Schlesinger’s daft but delightful impression of a peacock in her stand-up special Elder Millennial (Netflix). She does many voices, but the peacock is unforgettable.

Raja Sen (@rajasen) is a screenwriter and critic. He has co-written Chup, a film about killing critics, and is now creating an absurd comedy series.