I don’t believe in Recep İvedik

“Recep İvedik 4,” one of just three movies that opened this week in Turkish cinemas, is the latest in Turkish comedian Şahan Gökbakar’s franchise that follows the absurd adventures of an incredibly rude, incredibly ignorant, incredibly ugly, incredibly hairy and incredibly… well, incredible man, who obviously goes by the name Recep İvedik.

The character is so caricaturized that it feels as if Gökbakar is trying his best to not offend real-life people that might bear any kind of resemblance with his İvedik, who might constitute a portion of his most diehard fans.

How more paradoxical could this get?

The Recep İvedik franchise is the spinoff of a series of short skits Gökbakar created for his TV show during the 2000s. Gökbakar’s show and his Recep İvedik skits were extremely popular back then and, honestly, the TV incarnation of İvedik was truly creative and funny in its mockery of the type of person it portrayed.

The problem is, İvedik is not really a character -- it’s just a type that represents the uneducated, good-for-nothing people you’ll see all the time on the busiest streets of İstanbul or elsewhere, whom we Turks have come to call “maganda.”

I wish Gökbakar had never left TV and tried to expand his 10-minute-a-week TV skits into not one, not two, but four full-length features. Or, if he was really this much into making movies, I wish he tried to create a more believable character -- a character -- for the cinema incarnation of İvedik.

I can understand the appeal of the millions of liras to be earned from the millions of already existing fans flocking to cinemas to watch their favorite TV skit made into a full feature rather than depending on a more modest income -- but still in the millions -- from a TV station. I can even understand Gökbakar preferring to spend just a few weeks on a movie set that does not require much production design over the day-to-day hard work that a weekly TV show requires.

What I don’t understand is, if the movie-going crowd in Turkey was this much into the comedy genre, why then has “The Hangover Part 3,” for instance, sold only 421,424 tickets in Turkey, or even worse, the first “Hangover” film in 2009 just above 93,000 tickets, whereas the first three films in the Recep İvedik franchise have sold a whooping 11,960,750 tickets combined?

But more importantly, what I will never understand is how and why the comedy genre in Turkey has been reduced to just making stupid faces, speaking in incredibly exaggerated accents and creating types that look like they belong to another universe with all the excessive make-up and hairdos -- which is a much bigger problem than Gökbakar choosing to shout İvedik’s stupid lines on the big screen instead of the TV.

And seriously, dear Turkish movie distributors, do you think it’s really fair to release “Recep İvedik” -- and only “Recep İvedik” -- on one week, and nine, sometimes even 12 films with at least four quality films among them on another?

I’m off to the movies -- to see “Her,” a film that tells the fictional story of an unlikely relationship between a writer and a computer operating system. I bet it will offer a much more convincing movie-going experience than Gökbakar’s İvedik, ironically based on the everyday men we see every day on the streets of this city.