Skull & funny bones

SENSE OF HUMOUR

Amaster-servant saga used to keep much of Kerala grinning. One story goes thus. The servant wanted to travel to his village to see his wife. He asked someone senior in the household: “How do I ask him for a week’s leave, he’s so grumpy!”The man said, “Wait till he’s in a good mood.”

“And how do I know when he’s in a good mood?”
“That’s easy. Catch him when he’s laughing.”
A couple of days later, in an unfortunate accident, he knocked down a priceless crystal vase. The master walked in just then. Looking at the broken pieces on the ground, he broke into a bitter laugh and said, “That’s all I need now!”

Seeing his master laugh, the relieved servant asked: “Can I have the week off, sir?”
Today, we live in an age evoked by this story: unfortunate accidents, bitter laughter and wrong reactions. And real, but unseen, humour.

You sometimes wonder whether cartoonist R K Laxman’s death wasn’t a cosmic pointer to the official end of the Indian sense of humour. The end of a state of being. Where you could laugh at the high and mighty and still survive. Or, say something seriously funny and be recognised for your wit, not your “rebellion” or “arrogance”. In vintage days, parliamentarians like Piloo Mody and the like could set a whole house on laughter, this side and that, Government and Opposition. It must have been sheer happiness to laugh out without considering a hundred eerie possibilities. It must have been bliss to be alive in the days before the committed sense of humour (like a committed judiciary).

Today is the age of Groups. Incredibly diverse watchdog cells are standing by — including nameless groups that change shape to slither hither as well as thither. Like the MGM lion, they keep turning this way and that, roaring their disapproval, filing law suits and making life miserable for those who have a sense of humour, but not the sense to hide it.

So you have to think twice before you laugh; three times before you crack a joke. Dried-up custodians of other people’s morals are waiting round the corner to take you to task. It’s difficult to imagine a golden era when humorists weren’t pilloried by humourless social activists and biased party spokesmen, egged on by earnest TV anchors upping their TRPs. And of course, poked and jibed at by hidden Facebook faces with opinions stronger than their courage.
Custodians of other people’s morals were always around, of course, but not so matter-of-fact. My father used to talk about an old Malayalam play where the cause of an unwed pregnancy is appropriated by local politicians. They take out a procession shouting slogans against the perpetrator and yelling: “Kunjamma’s pregnancy is the villagers’ pregnancy!” We can imagine how Kunjamma must have felt. That’s just an extreme case of how The People appropriate your most personal moments, highlighting them as beacons of injustice, exploitation, antipathy, whatever.

Humour shouldn’t be a categorisable item. But it is, today. You’re told what can be laughed at and what cannot.

Learning to laugh at oneself

If you laugh seeing someone take a funny fall, you should also have the heart to go help him up. True humour is where everything’s ticking: mind, heart and will. It’s a wholehearted thing, not the Ha-Ha-Ha of early morning laughter therapy groups. Humour is a complete thing. It’s being able to see the funny side along with the non-funny one, it’s being able to notice what no one else has noticed. I remember a picnic on the beach decades ago when I almost drowned at sea. I was pulled out of water and dragged on to the sand. While everyone was looking concerned, my niece, a little girl from Bangalore, broke into uncontrollable laughter. At the time it seemed monstrously cruel. Later, I realised what the sight must have been to a youngster who didn’t realise its seriousness. Humour is also innocence, and then understanding.

My paternal uncle was a master of wry humour. When his elder brother (not my father) chastised him for changing his mind too often, he confessed, “That’s true, I’m so changeable. I wish I were like you. All your ideas and opinions were set like rock when you were 14 years old. Fifty years later, they’re still rock.”
It takes a great amount of courage to say things like that to your seniors. And even more courage to accept them from your juniors.

Dean Martin and Co. collected many committed viewers on the strength of their roasting panel. Middle-aged and old celebrities lined up to abuse and misuse a “special guest” who laughed almost as loud as the bloodthirsty audience, very much like an arena of lions during an entertaining Roman outing. The Roast was a no-holds-barred event with cuss-words and personal attacks, disclosures of intimate secrets that may or may not have been true. It was all in the game.

When roasting was recently replicated in India with a fun, young team, the reactions hit the ceiling. The invited audience — with many celebrities among them — laughed and cheered the show. Afterwards, many who consumed all this black humour had severe indigestion. You poke fun at someone, he laughs it off, in fact, in this case he’s paid to laugh it off. But someone else takes offense and screams, “You call this humour?” If it’s a recorded show, ban the stuff before innocent members of our public get corrupted by vile language and viler references.
But wait.

It’s not that you can’t understand the protestors at all. Take a look at the two controversial humour episodes. Both were designed to offend. Both did the trick, easily. And both ended up with unexpectedly horrible responses. I’m talking of these Indian “roasts” and earlier the Paris journal which published calculatedly crude cartoons of gods with a view to offend. The problem is the time we live in. We may stir up controversy, or rebel to prove a point. But we don’t know who’s going to react, and how. The Indian roasters found themselves banned and vilified. They must have been at least partially prepared for it, so indiscreet was their show.

The Paris journal had it worse. The journal and its supporters said, they may have killed our guys, but they’ll never have their way, we’ll continue to do what we’ve been doing. That sounds brave, but death is an irreversible certainty. Think about it. Deliberately offending a majority of people in the name of freedom of expression is hardly the stuff of martyrdom. Rather than point out excess in religion, they went into excess themselves. A cartoon is a signboard.

An easily recognisable, identifiable signboard that places a funny mirror in front of you. It’s no solution, just a reminder that it’s time for a solution. The Paris cartoons bypassed humour and settled for vituperation. Rather than being an all-encompassing sun throwing light on our darkest pockets of hatred, their humour scorched everything, including themselves. Because you never know who’s waiting out there.

Today, this has become the crucial question: how prepared are you for the consequences of your humour?

Humour is not always the truth. People often make up things about you because it makes other people laugh. But if humour is talent, it’s also water from a deeper well. It goes as deep as the core of your humanity. Just see how it is in cinema. The best comedians are the complete actors, the ones who make you cry and laugh, who make you believe. That’s how complete a sense of humour makes you. It’s not just a tool to hurt or score brownie points, or to play to the gallery. It’s a way of looking with understanding. Or innocence. It’s a way of spotting the difference, even when there doesn’t seem to be any.

Ageing is just a fact of life

Age is definitely a factor. Children notice the funniest things. As we grow older, we’re more or less shadowed by a delusion of respectability, deciding what to laugh at. Look at the way the circle has turned. In the previous century, you actually saw people growing up and ageing. Today, when you try to remember old people in your life, you’re surprised to find they weren’t that ancient then, just 30 or 40-plus. Responsibility created an aloofness, and elders tended to stand apart. Later, in an age of smaller families, parents (especially fathers who kept kids at a distance in the old days) stayed young to keep pace with their children. More things were accepted, people expressed themselves without inhibition, and anyway TV, magazines and the Net were removing walls and curtains. Parents and children became friends. They could laugh at the same things. Things were so free, it probably got excessive.

Now we’ve come full circle.People have turned conservative again, and the stricter they are, the more violent their responses. You crack a misplaced joke, you could be mocked, cursed or killed. You never know. If you laugh at a VIP, you could find cops at your door the next day. Humour has soured, laughter’s cracking. If you laugh at someone, and both of you can still put your arms around each other, that’s humour. When your laughter mocks and your victim has daggers in his eyes, something’s wrong! You’d probably have to wait for the next cycle to begin. Because the more repressive a society becomes, the more likelihood that a reactionary turnaround is imminent.

Maybe there’s a fun light waiting at our horizon right now, even as we speak.These days when our rulers are ruled by arrogance, we need to think back on the safeguards our societies had to keep regal arrogance at bay. Take the Chakyar of the Kerala theatre tradition. He was licensed to mock. While telling stories from myths, he looked around, commented on society, on prominent persons and their peccadillos, and even made fun of the audience. So everyone was on their best behaviour. If anyone protested, the Chakyar would remove his headgear and walk out.

Now it so happened that the Travancore ruler Ayilyam Tirunal was watching a performance. The Chakyar made fun of something the King did. Before he could be caught, he escaped. But one day he was spotted at a riverside and escorted back to court. Ayilyam Tirunal looked at the unfortunate gentleman and growled, “Now how does it feel?” Pat, without a hint of hesitation, came the reply: “Your Highness, I feel like a rat before a cat.” The court watched in stunned silence because Ayilyam Tirunal was famed for his “cat’s eyes”. The ruler was equally stunned, but something twinkled within him and he burst into laughter. The court, relieved, followed suit.

The court jester’s role was always that, to prick a few balloons when they over-bloated. You needed to see things in perspective, to find a balance. Otherwise, the people you were responsible for would rise up and tell you what to do. Or you’d go on till you fell. The emperor’s new clothes needed a child’s eye to spot the truth, and like they say, truth will always be out. If humour — rather than anger, righteousness or remorse — can be used to point out mistakes, our world would be a much lighter place to be. We all need our own inner court jester who’ll break our balloons and keep us grounded and laughing.
Because, like the wise old soul once said, you can make a person laugh, but you can’t make his eyes twinkle.

For that you need to wait for the next cycle. When the fun light spreads over the horizon to usher in a new age of happy, guiltless laughter.