The audacity of humor

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Warkop DKI was probably the country’s most successful comedy trio, their films still hitting the funny bone 30 years after their heyday. M. Taufiqurrahman meets the last surviving member.

For someone who enjoyed massive success with his 34 movies topping the box office throughout the 1980s, Indrojoyo “Indro” Kusumonegoro, the last remaining member of the legendary comedy group Warkop DKI, now leads a modest though comfortable life.

His house in Kayu Putih, East Jakarta, could easily be mistaken for the drab abode of yet another middle-ranking government official, with a narrow garage that barely holds his two cars and three motorbikes. One of the cars is a 1981 Jeep that he bought with his paychecks from the early Warkop movies and that he hangs on to as a keepsake.

On any given day, the 52-year-old can be found in the Cempaka Putih neighborhood, shopping for groceries for his wife at a nearby supermarket, or taking care of his various non-entertainment interests.

It could be that a love of big bikes (he’s a card-carrying member of the Harley-Davidson club in Indonesia, and named all three of his children with the initials H.D.) has drained some of the income he made from his heyday. There is also the quality of modesty that he learned from being a member of the once politically conscious comedy trio.

“In the 1980s, it would have been easy for us to release five movies in a year, and all would be blockbusters,” Indro says. “But we refused to do that. We had to be consistent with what we said when we criticized the greed with which the Soeharto family sucked up much of the state’s wealth.”

In today’s Indonesia, entertainers – comedians more so – habitually steer clear of anything political.

But Indro, together with Wahjoe “Dono” Sardono and Kasino Hadiwibowo of Warkop DKI, not only talked politics – they talked about it when the topic was a no-no.

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It was a time when people still took humor and comedy seriously, when wit and sarcasm still made up the ingredients of comedy shows, when jokes were still imbued with political and social consciousness – as opposed to today’s parade of television fools who trade punches and shrieks in slapstick sitcoms.

In the early 1970s, the New Order regime of president Soeharto had not yet sunk its teeth into society. It was a time when university students and other elements of civil society – who had helped bring down Sukarno a few years earlier – still enjoyed a semblance of freedom.

It was a moment, in the words of the student leaders of the time, when university students read books and listened to decent music.

It was also before the fame-driven entertainment industry had gained its current stranglehold, and it was still possible to form a comedy group consisting of buddies who hung out after class.

Warkop DKI, consisting of Dono, Kasino and Indro, came together under such circumstances.

The first gig they performed – then consisting of Dono, Kasino, Nanu Mulyono and Rudi Badil, all of them liberal arts students at the University of Indonesia – was on a makeshift stage at a gathering of students held to plan a protest against the state visit of then Japanese prime minister Tanaka on Jan. 14, 1974.

The protest turned violent, becoming the first major conflagration of the New Order era. Following the incident, student leaders were jailed and student organizations were forced to close down or toe the government line; but the comedians from Warkop carried on without toning down their criticism of the New Order regime.

If anything, Warkop summoned up the courage to take their politically charged shows to a new medium: radio. In 1975, Warkop signed a contract to appear on a talk show on Prambors Radio, then a trendsetting station popular among Jakarta’s young and rich.

One of the group’s well-known gigs for the radio station was titled Pengen Melek Hukum (Wanting to Know About Laws), in which each of the three took turns checking off the types of laws in the country, from Archimedes’ Law and the law of karma, to the law of the jungle and the iron law – a thinly veiled mockery of law enforcement in the country during the period.

Indro, who lived next door to the Prambors studio in the Central Jakarta neighborhood of Menteng, joined Warkop during this period.

The show – in which the trio skewered the behavior of government officials — was an instant hit, and by 1976, the trio had migrated to the small screen of state-owned broadcaster TVRI, albeit only once a year. They were limited to the New Year show Papiko, but it was a highly anticipated event and their fame grew.

By 1979, the only medium that Warkop had not attempted was film, and Indro says the group initially refused to take their sardonic wit to the big screen despite it being the major medium in the country in the era of only one TV station.

Warkop eventually gave in to offers and shot Mana Tahan (Hard to Resist) that year. The story of four university students living in a boarding house (the only Warkop film featuring Nanu Mulyono), run by a pretentious landlady and with eye candy in the form of the sensual dangdut singer Elvi Sukaesih, changed their status from niche comedy group to bankable superstars. They would go on a phenomenal run as the top box-office draw for more than a decade, with their films pulling in hundreds of thousands of viewers. They made big bucks for themselves and the studio executives, and also launched the careers of a slew of starlets.

The move to the big screen also marked a significant turning point for the group.

In an effort to reach a wider audience, Dono, Kasino and Indro had to use the lowest common denominator of dirty jokes, corny sight gags and sophomoric one-liners, when in fact they could have gone the other way, given the ample creative control they enjoyed.

At the height of their success in the 1980s, the trio could handpick the director for their movies and get any high-paid actress to star in them. They could also dictate how much they were paid per movie.

Nevertheless, Indro says it was a calculated move and argues not all of the trio’s films are slapstick farces.

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“We did something that no one in the industry had ever done before – we did our own survey, a meticulous one, to find out exactly what type of comedy the audience wanted,” he says.

“Turned out what they wanted was slapstick, so we decided to just entertainment them first. We put aside our political ideals right after the first movie.”

The three members of Warkop sat down together to come up with decent scripts for each of their films.

“We took the job seriously. We thought through every joke that we wrote,” Indro says.

“We always came up with a concept for our comedy, and we considered that our lasting legacy. The young comedians of today should learn about taking the job seriously.”

In the early 1980s, at the height of Warkop’s popularity, Kasino told Varianada magazine that pornographic jokes were the group’s strong suit, but was quick to add that Warkop had copied the dirty jokes from foreign magazines.

Dono, considered the intellectual of the group – a journalist by training, he once taught sociology at the University of Indonesia –named US comedian Bob Hope as Warkop’s biggest inspiration.

Over the next decade, Warkop stuck to the winning formula and made millions from their Benny Hill-ish comedy. They won a legion of new fans throughout the country, but in the process alienated some of their earlier supporters.

Student leader Hariman Siregar, who Indro credits as the godfather of Warkop DKI, was one of the first to criticize the career move. (On the godfather role, Hariman says it probably came from creating an environment conducive for freedom of expression to thrive by containing the influence of Muslim-based organizations that frowned upon the flowering of artistic freedom).

“It was obvious that Warkop had become the victims of capitalism by producing movies only as entertainment,” Hariman says.

“This was something that went against our stance that art should serve a greater purpose of educating the public. But it was their choice and I respected that.”

Warkop was unperturbed by the critics, and in the early 1990s they churned out movie after movie built around the theme of quirky-faced Dono being the butt of all the jokes but lucky enough to date the lead actress, Kasino spouting his dirty jokes, and pretty-boy Indro playing the rich kid pulling pranks on the others.

The good times lasted until the mid-1990s, with the trio still releasing new flicks even when the Indonesian film industry was at its lowest ebb. They continued to release two movies a year for the Idul Fitri and New Year holidays, when the faltering local industry could only put out a handful of semi-pornographic feature movies.

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When the film industry finally ground to a halt in 1995, Warkop took their winning formula back to the small screen, but this time with mixed results. Sitcoms produced for TV station Indosiar got low ratings. It was apparent that the Warkop formula had been done to death by the new crop of comedians mining the trio’s shtick for inspiration.

Audiences, some say, were turned off by the racy jokes and cheesy storylines. It may have looked like Warkop had sold out, but Dono, Kasino and Indro insisted they had done so in a professional manner.

They were so professional about getting the job done, Indro says, that at times they put aside their personal differences so they could work on the job at hand.

“I remember one time Dono and Kasino had a serious fight and they hadn’t spoken to each other in three years, and so for the brainstorming sessions they’d write messages to each other,” he says.

“People paid for our movies; they didn’t want to know what went on behind the scenes.”

But the years of working together also built up a strong camaraderie between the three comedians, despite the personal disputes. So strong was the bond that Indro considered calling it quits when Kasino died of brain cancer in 1997. Deciding against it, he and Dono continued doing sitcoms and stage engagements. The second major blow to the group was Dono’s death from lung cancer four years later.

“I didn’t know what to do with myself for a whole year after Dono’s death; I thought about retiring from the entertainment business and doing something else,” Indro says.

But Warkop was a cultural institution too valuable to give up on. Indro soldiered on by producing more episodes of the eponymous sitcom before Indosiar canceled it in 2008. Indro continues to make regular appearances on Indosiar, hosting variety shows.

Off the air, Indro had a hand in setting up a foundation to keep the Warkop legacy alive. Lembaga Warkop is the only organization sanctioned and run by the families of the Warkop members. Its primary aim is to promote activities celebrating the works of the comedy trio.

The foundation is chaired by Kasino’s daughter, Hanna Sukmaningsih, and deputized by Dono’s son, Andhika Ario Seno. Indro’s son, Ipoet, serves as the foundation’s treasurer.

Indro says he hopes the foundation can double as a profit-making enterprise to provide financial support for the children of Dono and Kasino, something he has worked for since the deaths of the two.

The welfare of Dono and Kasino’s children is not the only concern that keeps Indro preoccupied these days.

Since 2005, Indro, considered the most senior figure in the country’s comedy scene, has chaired the Indonesian Association of Comedy Artists (PASKI), the first organization of its kind set up to improve the welfare of the country’s comedians. The industry is full of sad stories of comedians and other entertainers living out their final years in poverty.

For Indro, it has been a thankless job with very little achieved in the past four years of his tenure. His effort to levy insurance premiums on card-carrying members of the organization was shot down, while even the simple task of convening members for a meeting was held back by procedural red tape.

Of his insurance proposal, Indro says, “I just wanted to promote the idea that if you’re financially secure, you can be more creative and more professional, but no one bought it.”

Today’s comedians seem to have forgotten that when Warkop reigned over the entertainment scene, they were taken seriously at the box office and were well paid for it. It was only one of the ways the quirky threesome blazed a trail, and Indro is still soldiering on today.

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