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| Vol. 4, Issue 2 February 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Essay |
The Importance of Not Being Earnest
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| The larger implications of a country that takes itself too seriously |
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O BODY REALLY DOUBTS that the Indian public has a great sense of humour. Toothless grandmothers sing ribald wedding songs about sex, nautanki and street performers deliver biting satires about politicians and tycoons, and everyone tells sardarji jokes— which may be lame, and paralleled all over the world (“An Irishman, an Englishman and |
a Pole walk into a bar…”) but at least demonstrate a willingness to mock one’s own. The Indian sense of humour is sophisticated, nuanced, and referenced across a vast array of comedy-rich social and cultural cues, much of it universally accessible, much of it unmistakably rooted in the Indian context. Possibly only an Indian can fully appreciate why it’s so funny when a young man calls another young man ‘aunty.’
Public India, on the other hand, seems to have no sense of humour at all. The mainstream media space—where public figures such as politicians and movie stars shape the national dialogue—is where fun goes to die. Here, in both the English and the vernacular spaces, people seem unwilling or unable to give or take a gentle ribbing, let alone attempt sarcasm and other sharper kinds of humour.
Typical example: a couple of years ago, Indo-Canadian comedian Russell Peters came to India and, in the course of his sold-out show, mentioned Aishwarya Rai. “She’s a stunning, beautiful woman, but she can’t act for shit!” he said. This was not particularly funny, merely true. What made the jam-packed hall shriek with laughter was the sheer delight of watching someone dare to take a bite out of a muchrevered Bollywood VIP. The newspapers, on the other hand, instead of laughing with Peters, gathered outraged reactions from Rai’s friends and admirers. (“Russell Peters has no business coming to India!” and “Who does he think he is?”) This is also funny, but unintentionally so.
To take another example, while one wishes BJP President Nitin Gadkari the best of health, it was hard to keep a straight face when he fainted during a march protesting rising food prices. It’s funny enough to see a fat man lead the starving proletariat. It’s even funnier that he wasn’t even walking at the time—he was riding in a little chariot. Apparently, the vehicle was just not up to his usual standards because they had to bundle him into a car and drive to the endpoint of the march.
Comic opportunities are passed by 50 times a day in this country. It looks as if by and large our journalists are prissy, our columnists prim, our television hosts laboured, our reviewers timid, our ‘candid camera’ shows no more than slapstick. Few people will risk a laugh. Why is that?
At the heart of most comedy is a kernel of truth. Humour is a form—often a devastating form—of criticism, and the more self-important we are, the more unable and unwilling we are to take criticism, and therefore, naturally, the more we cry out to be deflated. In India, self-importance is so rampant (for the most part for no discernible reason) that if you poke fun at someone, chances are that they’ll react with righteous indignation. For humour to work it must be treated as humour; and if the butt of the joke won’t play along, at least the rest of the audience must. But most public figures are incapable of laughing at themselves; and most people have too complicated a relationship with perceived authority to be caught laughing at it. As a result, much of the smiling on display remains of the smug or ingratiating variety.
Henri-Louis Bergson pointed to a core feature of comedy in his essay, ‘Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.’ He speaks of the absence of feeling which usually accompanies laughter:
It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. […] highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter.
To a dispassionate eye, he says, “many a drama will turn into comedy; the comic demands something like a momentary anaesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.”
Indians are probably the most emotional people in the world, and the most expressive. (Italians are famously volatile too, but it was Indians who had to develop great schools of meditation that seek to rule the storms of heart and mind.) Is it possible that we simply have no capacity for being dispassionate? This super-sensitivity is reinforced by the fact that we’re incredibly hierarchical. We carefully socialise our children to be respectful of hierarchies—to fiercely resist any takedown of their own position, keep those lower down in their place, and be scrupulously deferential to those higher up.
As at home, so on the world stage. Few nations are as image-obsessed as ours. We routinely use phrases like ‘tarnish the national image’ without a shadow of irony. Neither the desired national image nor what constitutes tarnish has ever been defined; but if an alien were to read nothing but our newspapers, and listen to nothing but our public figures, it would report to its leader that all our woes stem from a conspiracy to make India look small in the eyes of the world. The national image and national pride are constantly reported to be under threat by many things—though not by many you’d expect. The rape of foreign women—but not of Indian women. The detention and questioning of Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan at an American airport—but not the laughable punishment, equivalent to traffic accident penalties, handed out to the accused parties in the Bhopal gas tragedy case. The presence of beggars on the streets of the capital during a major international sporting event—but not the lack of public bathrooms that causes men to pee directly onto walls and sidewalks, and women to hold it in until their kidneys explode. We love to honk on about our ‘emerging superpower status’ but suffer a meltdown if anyone mentions 300 million people going to bed hungry every day, egregious corruption that is a sanctioned part of business as usual, and daily commissions of caste and gender atrocities.
Domestic critics aren’t appreciated. But our national nostrils quiver with particular rage should the disparagement come from foreign quarters. It’s like bitching about one’s family— family members can just about get away with it, but non-relatives had better not agree. We know all about the awful corruption and the abysmal efficiency, but we aren’t ashamed of it until an outsider points it out. The truth is that we couldn’t seek outside approval more, nor bristle more when we don’t get it.
It all smells of chronically low self-esteem and a nagging desperation about the state of the nation. No wonder, then, that our instincts are to be either stuffy or god-bothering. We live in a society comprised of unequal power relationships, in gender, age, caste and experience— inequalities so deeply ingrained that they self-perpetuate smoothly. A woman brought up to believe that her husband has a right to beat her is unlikely to tell her daughter to stand up for herself. A man who has never dared to express disagreement with an older man will not tolerate insubordination from his son. A student who was raised not to question her teacher will be remain intellectually docile and never innovate. A Dalit who believes in the Brahmin’s right to boss him around will obey orders.
| HINDUSTAN TIMES |
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Corpulent BJP pres Gadkari faints during a march. |
Not for nothing did India generate the term ‘sacred cows.’ Our propensities are to conflate the important and the beloved with the sacred. Religiosity is one of those hyper-passionate states that least tolerates challenge or iconoclasm, so the sacred is seen as untouchable. Our public figures are treated not as famous people but as ‘icons’—think Sachin Tendulkar or MG Ramachandran—and we react badly to perceived disrespect. The belief gap is an abyss that, by its nature, no amount of rationality or logic can bridge; there are penalties, both threatened and actual, for irreverence.
And humour is, of course, the archenemy of reverence. Its purpose is to let the air out of overinflated balloons. Its engine is disruption and subversion, generated by surprise, paradox, absurdity, contradiction or incongruity; it lives largely by touching the untouchable. The more rules and protocols there are, the more scope there is for humour.
You would think, therefore, that India would be positively bursting with comedians, jesters, gadflies and satirists. You’d think that we’d have at least one Jon Stewart—smart and funny and taking the piss out of everyone from the construction labourer to the prime minister. You would think that we’d have at least one Indian version of the widely read satirical American ‘fake news’ online paper, The Onion, whose deadpan style shadows real news closely enough to be really biting. Instead, surrounded by some of the world’s richest comic material, the best we have is CNN-IBN’s rather flat The Week That Wasn’t hosted by Cyrus Broacha, which is a step in an interesting direction but with miles to go; and The Great Indian Tamasha show on NDTV, which has great puppets but a script that is nothing short of embarrassing.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Sukanya
13 September 2010
07:29 PM
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This piece is so telling and spot on! Well done Mitali! I am reminded of the sarcastic American humor and how Indians do so badly when it even comes to sitcoms and talk shows. Take Jay Leno's hilariously outrageous line for instance: "Unemployment among younsters is on the rise all across the world. In fact, in China it is so bad that children as old as seven have to move back in with their parents.."
Double whammy!
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samratb
6 September 2010
04:46 PM
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nailed it ! the artical totally exposes the higher echelons of india as one boring vapid and shoddy bunch of tigh ass people .. fuck them ! they dont define nothing .. other than clapping and smiling to a lousy anthem song done by yet another indifferent maestro a.r.rehman !
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Yogesh
2 September 2010
07:04 PM
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This is a very nice piece...
I think in India... humor is in ICU; where it is lifelessly ticking, along with frail cultural sensitivity laying on a bed unattended, for too long. Just to get a real sense of how humor is drying in minds one needs to look at the furor over Joel Stein’s humor piece in Time magazine.
The episode throws up a question: is our sense of humor is in thrall of bawdy laughter shows alone. The answer could be: a big yes or a mild no. But if one goes by the scale of bellicose reaction the humor piece generated both on and off screen, it is easy to figure out how humorless we have become.
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gouri dange
1 September 2010
08:19 AM
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laughed at your piece. really so much pomposity and taking-self-serioulsy going around in these parts. i write about it often, and of course get huffy people sending me puffy messages about 'spoiling the name of India' etc.
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James Thomas
30 August 2010
11:41 PM
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Terrific piece and the truth through it's core is that respect should be earned not owed, that a few words of gentle humour can express more than a thousand steeped in vitriol and self-righteousness...
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TrueIndian Part II
30 August 2010
09:28 PM
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Make that 3000 words. There is a Page 2 as well.
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Gargi
30 August 2010
04:13 PM
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Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. - EB White.
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True Man
26 August 2010
02:45 PM
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What is worse than not getting a joke has to be a 1500 word write-up on humor. The irony seems somehow lost on Mitali.
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ruchika
24 August 2010
11:47 PM
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" ....it was Indians who had to develop great schools of meditation that seek to rule the storms of heart and mind"
great point...i know its an aside, but i love it!
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vipul vivek
16 August 2010
01:59 AM
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@suryadas grossness is also a way of cocking a snook at the aesthetics of power. Humour need not always be tickling.
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suryadas
15 August 2010
01:30 AM
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Mr.Vivek,I am afraid, you sound like a stake holder in fakenews.com or may be you have very different concept of humour.Sorry.the site is so humourless that it can be an object of humour.please grant us indians with some sensibility some intellkigence.
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Ted Limi
2 August 2010
09:06 PM
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Well done! Go Russell, Go! Life is so boring without humour! Here we have our "Newfie" jokes. In holland they have the Belgian jokes. Romanians pick on the Hungarians, the US on the Mexicans. So it goes!
We all make fun of ourselves. That's life. Being prissy and taking everything seriously, only leads to a short life.
Keep up the great work!!
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Vivek
1 August 2010
07:55 PM
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A very telling piece. We are ready to mock at others but only within the safe confines of our homes with our close friends. In public, we become mute. I am reminded of the the movie Gulal. In the opening scene, Kay Kay is giving a fiery speech. In the middle he says, "Apni ghar k zameen ko apna desh bana k baithe hain log"(People are so confined to their homes that they seem to have made them their countries). So true.
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vipul vivek
29 July 2010
05:28 PM
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"You would think that we’d have at least one Indian version of the widely read satirical American ‘fake news’ online paper, The Onion, whose deadpan style shadows real news closely enough to be really biting."
Hasn't the author ever come across this: http://www.fakingnews.com/ ? Or, is it too peaky?
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