What Connects PM Modi, Indo-Pak Memes and Trevor Noah?

What’s cracking us up? Is your joke speaking truth to power?

What threads PM Modi, Trevor Noah, and Indo-Pak memes together? 

(Photo: The Quint)

Humour is rewriting itself and we are back-pedalling, more often than not.

This one’s a fairly new crusade and a true-blue trickster because the lines are blurry and the list is on auto-update. But hey, political correctness is here to stay; polish, scrape, and sharpen your brain-to-mouth filters. So, moot up, if you have alternatives in mind.

But first let’s rewind a bit.

India and Pakistan have been on tenterhooks and the country, for the most part, has been perched on a volcano of conflicts. Amidst all this, while you and I were swamped in headlines and squabbles, this is what The Daily Show host Trevor Noah said:

Noah apologised right after, post an aggrieved backlash on social media. He said that he did not mean to hurt anyone and that he uses comedy to process pain and discomfort. He even mentioned, as a reiteration of the above, that he’s made jokes after his mother was shot in the head.

They say laughter does in the nervous system what a pressure-relief valve does in a steam boiler. What after that?

For Noah, comedy serves to relieve and recuperate. What serves as therapy for Noah might be cracking others up, but it might also be subconsciously drilling in the wrong stuff — immortalizing stereotypes based on race, in this case.

Then that’s a problem, right? And one can argue that for someone who’s a public figure, holding considerable sway over public opinion, such microaggressions are definitely not cool.

Here’s another example: Prime Minister Modi , at a recent event, made a comment about dyslexia while taking a potshot at a political rival. This happened before school students who were trying to raise awareness about the disability.

Naturally, it did not go down well with most people. Making light of a disability is slighting the experiences of countless people who are living with it. Fair enough.

But, there was also a fair share of yaysayers who insisted that a ‘joke’ is a ‘joke’ — ‘humour’ is based on ‘offence’ and everything can’t be straight-jacketed to conform to the needs of the PC police. You know, if you want to be a unicorn with a halo shining out of your rear-end, don’t go looking for humour anywhere!

Now, given both viewpoints, how do we arrive at a consensus? Or is it even possible to reach one?

It is a post-truth world and each one draws their own line. With a public figure, it is easier to straighten out the creases and say that model behaviour from them matter — because the prerogative lies on them to set an example. But what about personal boundaries?

Here’s the deal: If FoE (freedom of expression) comes with caveats, the caveats are based on subjective boundaries and not objectives ones, thus blurring all lines.

You must have seen a truckload of Indo-Pak memes doing the rounds in the past few weeks. Here, again, the opinion is divided. While some think that laughing it out in tense situations such as these helps, others believe that it is plain insensitive to  look for punchlines when lives are at stake.

But yes, if we could use our wit — the kind that we are exhibiting — to uplift others instead of putting them down, what really is the beef? We might lose some of our go-to comedians, cult movies, and catchphrases.

Will that be a real bummer, though?

“Stop being so gay”

“Don’t act retarded”

“Yo mama so black, she disappears after sunset”

“Chudiya pehenke baith ja”

A lot of things that were okay back then aren’t okay now.

Race, gender, sexuality, body-image... these are battles we are all braving, and in the process, certain cultural conditioners are getting busted, but we’ll survive, I reckon. 

Because a lot of communities and groups, traditionally marginalised, have worked really hard to make their space and get the rights they deserve. So when the law has recognised the need to make major changes, why can’t we do the same?

If it is “just” a joke, it shouldn’t be that big a deal to rework our punchlines, right?

Yes, our comedians are in a spot and it is a creative challenge, but they can do better, I am convinced.

Of course, there is no clear-cut solution here; no one truth that governs all... so it’s difficult to ascertain exactly how much can we ghost-bust from our past, but we can start by asking each other this:

Is your joke speaking truth to power?