I teach a course on humour to the students of Bachelors of Technology at South Asian University. Philosophically tickled and sociologically informed, the youth, using history in the background, pose a daunting question: how to be humorous in a time of intolerance?
Kunal Kamra’s Naya Bharat, the stand-up comedy performed at Mumbai’s The Habitat Studios, had angered a politically motivated group of vandals. Kamra has attracted a ban culture and media trials since he started his show, Shut Up Ya Kunal. Vir Das had been hounded for his critical and poetic comedy act, Two Indias, in 2021. Is there, then, any space for critical humour in twenty-first century India?
Humour is as ancient as the human civilisation. Lee Siegel’s book on comic traditions in India informs us that even ancient mythology is replete with critical humour. Gods and goddesses poked fun, connecting the divine with the mortal through humour. South Asia’s cultural history also provides us with examples of clowns and court jesters, bahurupiyas and bhands. Likewise, the expression of humour adopted novel forms — cartoons and comic strips, theatre and cinema — in modern print and visual cultures.
Exploring the functional value of humour, classical anthropologists, such as A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Marcel Mauss, emphasised on joking relationships in kinship and society. Humour plays an important role in diffusing the tensions in social relations. Unlike the politics of mob or ideologically-tied electoral politics, humour pertains to a cultural politics that rejuvenates social relationships. However, the universal appeal of humour is coupled with relativism. A joke in one context may not make sense in another. A community in a particular time and space may value cuss words as tools for joking-relations but the same words may be deemed offensive in another community in another time and space.
The function of humour can also be paradoxical. Instances from India’s civilisational history underline humour’s subversive element. An ancient Sanskrit text, the Natyashastra, deemed to be the fifth Veda, was a treatise on rasas (emotions) for anubhav (experience) and abhinaya (enactment). The text became suspect after the students of Natyashastra began to perform a range of satirical acts caricaturing the sages. These performative acts of humour subverted the then normative order. Upset moral authorities declared the status of the text doubtful. Humour artists have always challenged the highbrow, the puritanical, and the status quoist. In so doing, humorous subversion enhances the threshold of social tolerance.
Humour’s paradoxical attitude continued in premodern as well as modern thought. Plato and Aristotle were deeply ambiguous about the role of humour. While acknowledging wit and humour to be essential tools in debates, Plato believed that scornful humour is opposed to intellectual seriousness and should be avoided. In fact, he went to the extent of suggesting that legal and moral guardians should avoid laughter.
India, like the rest of the world, needs an elaborate education and cultural policy to safeguard humour as a basic human right. This will enable citizens to understand the intricacies of humour and its role in a functional society. A functional society must retain the cultural politics of humour for consistent rejuvenation of the social order.
Dev Nath Pathak is Associate Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and teaches Humour to the engineering students at South Asian University