Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is without a doubt the greatest comedy made on the Indian screen. The film is outrageously funny and remarkable for its freshness and spontaneity. Director Kundan Shah casts a satirical eye on civic admistration, the police, the press and big business and combining slapstick humour with farce and verbal wit, comes up with a film that is delightfully irrelevant as it lampoons practically every institution.

The film makes various direct and indirect references. The collapse of the flyover shown in a TV news clip in the film is in fact footage of the actual Byculla bridge which collapsed shortly before the film was made. Tarneja and Ahuja are a composite of Bombay's biggest builder Raheja while Shobha the editor of Khabardaar is an allusion to Shobha De former editor of a film gossip magazine. The film is also full of in joke references. The two photographers are named after Shah's filmmaking colleagues and the code word Albert Pinto of the two sleuths refers to Saeed Akhtar Mirza's film of the same name. Large posters of Kumar Shahani's Maya Darpan (1972) and Mani Kaul's Uski Roti (1969) can be seen pasted on the walls during the chase. The park wherein the photographers take click the photograph of D'Mello's killing and blow up the picture repeatedly is called Antonioni Park since the sequence was obviously inspired from Antonioni's Blow Up.

Almost very sequence in the stands out brilliantly by itself whether it is the cake throwing or the secret meeting at Tarneja's house or a drunk Om Puri encountering D'Mello in his coffin and thinking his car has broken down and thus towing him around! But the highlight of the film is without doubt the chase of the missing corpse, which is a sizeable part of the film and provides the film with some of its most inventive and humorous moments. The sequence of the Mahabharata being enacted on stage with the corpse, as Draupadi is a scream!

The acting is uniformly marvelous with each of the actors spot on with their timings. But Satish Shah's deadpan performance as the corpse still takes the cake. Special mention must be made of Om Puri, who shows a wonderful unexplored till now range of comic timing.

Though the film ends on a pessimistic note. Shah justifies it by explaining

"The end is symbolic… I am trying to say that the system has put the common man into jail. In the kind of set-up which encourages corruption, he suffers the most."

It is a pity that after such a promising beginning, Kundan Shah's subsequent films made within the mainstream Hindi film Industry, while having their moments, are nowhere near the innovative level of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro which remains his best film by far.