Our first experience of laughter is almost always, I suspect, a pleasant one. In most cases, I imagine, it would be a parent or someone who loves you leaning over you, tickling your tummy, making gurgling sounds — and you reciprocating.
Then comes a new form of laughter, a laugh directed at you. This happens again, perhaps, in the context of the family. You’re tottering about on your chubby unsteady legs and suddenly they give way under you and you sit down on your well-padded bum and the change in your expression, the sheer surprise of it, makes everyone laugh. Even as a baby, you can smell the laugh and see that it is limned with love and so you don’t mind; you even grin at them.
Then there is the moment when a laugh turns into a weapon. Did you use it first? Or was it used against you? Perhaps this will forever determine your attitude to what humour means, what laughter is. Were you laughed at in the schoolyard? Or were you the laugher?
Let’s say someone had a wardrobe malfunction on the playground. Nothing much, just a button popping and you could see Ashish’s
But already you are being introduced to the ambivalence of laughter.
This may be the first valuable lesson about laughter that we learn: it is directional. Now turn for a moment to our society and its jokes. Traditional folk forms turned society on its head; the joke was on the big boy. Emperor Akbar sets the impossible task but the clever Birbal resolves it and covers himself with glory. Tenali Raman and Krishnadevaraya, ditto. The brahmin in the naatak is greedy and scheming but he is brought to his just desserts by Everyman. The large and powerful crocodile (whose uxoriousness makes him sacrifice friendship) is outwitted by the small but clever monkey. This is important because it allows all the small people in the audience to see themselves as triumphant, for a moment, over the powerful.
This is why a GSOH (good sense of humour) seems to be so important in our relationships. We all carry around a sense of self-importance, rarely in proportion to our real relevance. When this is pricked, we all bleed, but how we bleed is important. Do we pick up a bottle of acid? Or do we put on the self-deprecating laugh? Even with the latter, the story is not over. Are the brownie points we score at having been able to laugh at ourselves enough? Or do we keep score, waiting for our turn to hit back at the person who has shamed us?
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Humour is one of the things that make us human. I don’t want to hear about how, in an experiment, bonobos were shown to be making practical jokes or chimpanzees were shown to be punning. In all matters of what makes us human it is not the uniqueness of it but the variety and intensity we seem to put into it. We put a lot of time and energy into laughing or into seeking out things that will make us laugh. Bonobos do not have stand-up comedians whom they will pay many bananas to make them laugh. Nor do chimpanzees have wise fools to show up their folly even when they are on the blasted heath.
But this is what makes dictators and demagogues so wary of laughter. Now you think, ha, I know who he’s talking about, he’s talking about...
No, I’m talking about you.
Prime Ministers, chief ministers, ministers of every kind, they’re human too. This may seem difficult to believe, but they too have gone through the same learning curve about laughter; they’ve seen how effortlessly it deflates pretension; they’ve seen how it can turn the tide of admiration into one of scorn; they are terrified.
You are terrified.
The difference between you and them is that they have power and they do not mind using it. This may seem like a very large difference; after all, when someone mocks you, you can’t send out the police force and invoke the protection of the law. Or can you? Your little daughter mocks an illogical remark you make. What is your response? In her world, you are the judge, you are the jury and you represent everything that is powerful. Do you tell her not to ‘back answer’? Do you tell her to shut up? Do you simply turn off your affection for that moment and teach her to keep those remarks to herself? What is your response?
Let me ask you to consider another moment, again with your daughter who, for the purposes of this story, is delightfully round. She is a cheerful and happy child and you get her into the playschool of your choice. On the second or third day, she comes home in tears. She announces that she will not go to school again. She hates, hates, hates the school. When the storm passes and she can tell you what happened, it is an old story. There was a little boy and he wanted to play with her and she didn’t want to play with him, so he said, ‘Who wants to play with you, fatty bumbola?’ Then he ran around the playground, shouting ‘Fatty-fatty, bumbolatty/ Ate up all my ghee chapatti’. The other children laughed and laughed.
You are incensed.
You meet the teacher, who says it was a joke, the children had a good laugh. Should the children not laugh?
What is your response?
It is easy to say we have become a thin-skinned nation, but pain is subjective. As member of a community that has always been mocked by Bollywood, whose women are the Lilies and Rosies in the Garden of Earthly Pleasures, whose men are the Raaberts and the Tonys of the Gangs of New Bollywood, I wonder at the amount of emotional energy that is whipped up by a representation that is seen as offensive to a community. But it is their emotional energy and theirs to spend.
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It is easy to say that political correctness is making humour more and more impossible. It is easy to speak always in generalities. Here is the truth. We love the funny woman when she is laughing at someone else. We hate her — and yes, the word is hate for that one furious moment, hate wells up — when she is laughing at us. Look back now at the Akbar-Birbal stories; how many times was Birbal banished?
The funny woman is paid in our greatest coin, our laughter. She startles it out of us, and we feel our limbic systems respond, we begin to laugh, we like laughing, we laugh more and more, it rolls out of us and it pours into her/him and it is a flood tide of our love.
There is a payoff. There always is. For each man must kill the thing he loves. (Wilde knew this; how much he had made them laugh before they killed him.) ‘Why did s/he cross that line?’ we ask. Because no one knows where the line is and only fools rush in where angels fear to tread. The comic is the bravest fool we have. We should celebrate her. We don’t. We never will. Which is why they will always be the risk-takers, the wise fools who will die with us upon the blasted heath.
Jerry Pinto is an author, poet and writer of fiction