No Laughing Matter: Humor in the Indian Blogosphere

Greatbong (Arnab) [for DesiPundit]

One of the toughest thing to get right is humor—anyone who has been trying to get some laughs/sniggers from their written work would testify to that.

Of course there are some people like Mithun-da, Ballaya, Rajanikant, Vijaykant and certain nameless geniuses with profiles on shaadi.com who have the power to make sensible people (defined as those who believe in the laws of physics, logical causality and the syntactic structure/semantics of the English language) go berserk with joy almost all the time, with no effort at all. However, if we assume that humor is defined as making people laugh with you, rather than at you, then the above mentioned supermen and their methods have to be automatically, through regrettably, excluded from further consideration.

One of the things that make humor tough is the fact that it is wholly subjective – what is lame to you may be side-splittingly funny for me.

Remember that there is no “right” or “wrong” humor – if anything “rightness” is defined solely in terms of how many people smile.

So while many of us might consider the dry wit and sarcasm of “Yes Minister” as “better” humor than Shakti Kapoor dropping his chaddi and saying “Laja-babu tho gaya“, we should always remember that we make this judgment simply because we belong to a different “audience” than the one to whom Shakti Kapoor and Kader Khan speak to.

The challenge in humor thus lies in finding your audience – a group of people who, by virtue of being plugged into the same social and cultural milieu as you, are likely to find the same things funny.

As an example, Saturday Night Live’s “Wayne’s World”, would find few takers in India simply because people would not understand the laugh-inducing potential inherent in the lives of two stoned, stay-at-home losers (after all, we Indians stay at home throughout our lives – where is the loser angle we wonder) trying to be celebrities through a cable access show.

The other challenge for humor writers in India is the prevalent culture of competitive intolerance where everyone is falling over themselves, trying their level best to get offended by any and everything—an intolerance that is manifested in bans, fatwas, violence, vandalism, protests in underwear, and immolation attempts in rest-rooms.

In such an atmosphere, self-preservation makes it impossible for comedians to make fun of anything or anyone—a fact that may explain why so many Indian humorists stay on the straight and the narrow.

This is where the existence of a vibrant, desi blogosphere is like manna from heaven.

For one you have automatically found your audience—- a group of men and women, mostly students and professionals, who grew up in the 80s and 90s, and therefore are most likely to share your concept of “funny”.

And secondly, even if you do manage to offend a few of your readers, all that you need to worry about is a nasty comment or two. And that’s about as bad as it can get.

Consequently, bloggers have the license to be more edgy, more “in-your-face” than they could have afforded to be had they been writing in a mainstream publication where they would be constrained by editorial policy and the desire to protect themselves and their family from grievous harm.

Because humor is important – and not just to make people laugh. It can puncture an opposing viewpoint by scoffing at its ridiculousness (maybe not sound debating practice but works well enough) and can express outrage through sarcasm and acerbity. It can hurt, it can offend; and the way things are in the world, some people do deserve to be laughed derisively at – and sometimes that’s the only thing we can do.

Fortunately, the rarefied atmosphere of the Indian blogosphere frees bloggers from having to look over their shoulders every time they make a statement that may offend the ones in power. And that’s because, as of now, the blogosphere is small, our readership limited, we do not need to pander to commercial interests (if I make fun of so-and-so, will he still advertise with us?) and the opinion nazis still don’t know what a blog is.

However once the rabble rousers become aware of our existence and blogs become more popular, all that may change. When that happens, and a blogger has his home vandalized and another gets a fatwa on his head, all us wannabe-humorists will be reduced to making jokes about how people behave in marriage buffet lines, writing funny SMS shayri, doing podcasts mimicking Ashok Kumar (since Ashok Kumar fans are usually never of the militant variety) and observing how Girlfriend 1.0 upgrades to Wife 1.0.

And that my friends, will not be a laughing matter.