The process may have begun a few years back, riding on a tidal wave of drollery unleashed by the inimitable David Dhawan-Govinda combine, but it remained, by and large, a peripheral phenomenon. Comedies have only now made a riotous comeback in mainstream Bollywood. Ironically, Govinda has veered away to a different turf.

Just as well. The strain of humour that predominantly runs through Indra Kumar's Masti is quite different from the distinguishing attributes of Hindi cinema's classic comedies. Given the success it has achieved at the box-office, the new film could, in fact, spawn a spate of copycat comic ventures that hinge on the sexual pecadilloes of human kind.

Hindi film comedy has, indeed, begun to lose the last vestiges of innocence. When Kishore Kumar serenaded Madhubala in Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi in the late 1950s with Ek ladki bheegi bhaagi si, dollops of coyness tempered the eroticism inherent in the number.

Today, Vivek Oberoi can afford to break into a far less subtle expression of physical passion - crooning on the roof, in the rain with gay abandon - when he decides to woo a voluptuous Lara Dutta on a night out.

Masti  abounds in situations that border on the brazenly lewd. The film is not just about three young men who seek some excitement outside their marriages, it also takes recourse to an array of ribald gags to raise laughs. The fact that it does so with a fair degree of success goes to show that mainstream masti has finally been allowed to shed its inhibitions, thanks to the changed profile of the film-going masses.

A sex doctor who strolls around at all times with two skimpily clad ladies mistakes two of the film's heroes to be homosexual lovers and runs scared whenever he crosses their path. Gay jokes are, of course, no longer confined to certified sex comedies.

Even Nikhil Advani's Kal Ho Naa Ho had an entire sub-plot about a maid who is shell-shocked to discover that the young man of the house might have taken a gay partner. PC-obsessed filmgoers might not understandably find these gags particularly appetizing, but they do go down pretty well with less sensitive audiences.

It is the latter variety of filmgoer who determines a film's fate. It is well known that popular Hindi cinema thrives on its equations with the lowest common denominator syndrome. So does anybody really care if a few things end up offending some sensibilities as long as the cash counters keep jingling and a majority of the people goes home happy? Democracy has its uses.

Over the years, marital comedies have been a rare genre in Hindi cinema. That has perhaps been more a result of stringent censorship norms and the pressures of societal prudery than of any disinclination on the part of Mumbai filmmakers to venture into that terrain. Till the end of the 1990s, there were just a handful of Hindi films that could have been loosely slotted in the sex comedy genre.

Significantly, veteran directors whose names were firmly associated with clean family entertainment - B.R. Chopra (Pati Patni Aur Who), Hrishikesh Mukherjee (Rang Birangi), both, like Indra Kumar, inspired by Billy Wilder's The Seven-Year Itch, and Basu Chatterjee (Shaukeen) - were behind these stray attempts at "naughty" comedy. They were all one-off forays that, notwithstanding their considerable commercial success, did not quite shake and stir the Bollywood broth enough to make a lasting impression.

The times have changed and it can be safely assumed that Masti will not be alone in its bid to cash in on the obvious potential of adult comedy as a surefire box office bet. For one, Govind Menon, the man who directed Mallika Sherawat's much-discussed debut vehicle, Khwahish, is currently giving finishing touches to a sex and sleaze-laced comic romp that pits the unstoppable Rohtak bombshell against Bollywood's hottest Jat male, Dharmendra. It could prove to be a match made in box office heaven.

The masti has just begun….!