New Delhi, Feb. 26: Finance ministers must transmit so much that is grave — and often grim — on budget day, they find it necessary to mine their message with eruptions that might lighten the air: a romantic quote pulled ludicrously out of context, a self-deprecating dig, a facile double entendre, or, like with Mamata Banerjee two days ago, the sheer uninhibitedness and presence of mind of presentation.

Humour isn’t Pranab Mukherjee’s essential mien, though it must be said he tried. Poorly.

For all his labours, Mukherjee couldn’t exude humour; and midway through his professorial discourse, the Opposition totally lost its. So completely that it resorted to probably the first walkout in budgetary history.

By then, the finance minister had given up all pretence he had also come to provoke a laugh or two. Interruptions over the spike in fuel prices — slipped in so deftly, the Opposition took time to grasp its import — left Mukherjee livid of face and enraged of tone.

“You cannot do this, no, no you cannot,” he remonstrated, sword-rolling his arm. “This is a constitutional requirement, you have to listen, you have to let me speak, you have to, it is a constitutional necessity… I am reading on….”

Alas, his most ambitious leaps at humour were dragged away in the wake of the walkout — a hike in tobacco excise contexted to his having quit smoking several years ago, and a reduction in excise on toy balloons billed as a memo of joy to millions of children. The odds are they wouldn’t have brought the house down even if Johnny Walker — or Raju Srivastav, for the more contemporary — had been commissioned to render those references.

But his first shot at wit was probably his flattest. Try bursting into laughter and if you do you’ll probably win a huge cash prize in a forced laughter show some day or be a fit candidate for some asylum. Mukherjee made his prayer for a good monsoon to drive the economy thus: “I seek Lord Indra’s help to make the recovery more broad-based in the coming months.” Such prayer will easier fetch tears than rain.

Through most of it, Mukherjee droned on like a righteous professor, convinced of the virtue of his discourse and utterly resigned to a generally inattentive class. Of the former finance ministers in attendance — Manmohan Singh, Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha, P. Chidambaram — the former two sat rapt and the latter two took copious notes. And in the galleries, sparer today than usual, industrialist Rahul Bajaj and technocrat-politician N.K. Singh leaned most intently.

But beyond these and few more, Mukherjee’s hold appeared vanquished by the pursuit of other pre-occupations. Former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda snoozed on the crook of his wrist in the front Opposition bench. Plonked beside him, Lalu Prasad chuckled mischievously. Mulayam Singh Yadav repeatedly prompted him to nudge Gowda awake, but Lalu remained stoutly averse to the idea of putting an end to his benchmate’s embarrassment. “Sone do, sone do,” he reasoned with Mulayam. “Kya karega uth ke? (Let him slumber on, what will he do if he is woken up, anyhow?).”

Mamata skipped the better part of the opening hour altogether, the only minister prominent by her absence. She popped up in another part of the House — beside Shatabdi Roy in the middle rows — and remained there for the rest of the time, never once joining her ministerial colleagues. Was she trying to make some statement? Probably distancing herself from whatever she thought unpalatable to her political ends in Mukherjee’s budget? You could have bet on that. It wasn’t long before her party was carping about the fuel price hike and protesting Mukherjee’s additional levies on the railways.

But Mukherjee’s own backbenchers were probably the most errant on attention. Rahul Gandhi spent almost the entire length of the budget speech discussing some intricate scheme with Deepinder Hooda, drawing and re-drawing little pie charts on a notepad, taking an occasional aural cue from the front to tap his palm peremptorily on the bench-head in appreciation of an announcement he could not have had much notion of.

Sachin Pilot and R.P.N. Singh — both young ministers being primed for greater futures — were locked in an extended conversation of whispers, Pilot treating himself to repeated doses of pan masala from a pouch and Singh preferring a more updated version of mouth-freshener: gum. The two were stuck to each other.

Beside them, in the very cattle-class back row, Shashi Tharoor quietly signed away office files, rarely even bothering to look up from his immersion in paperwork, perhaps in resumed meditation over the political class’s lack of sense of humour.

Tweeting isn’t permissible yet from the floor of the House, else he could have thumbed us today’s elusive laugh. Mukherjee, most likely, would not have been amused.