AIB apology for comedy is a tragedy. The self-righteous right will be stronger
When the All India Bakchod ‘pushed the envelope, the envelope pushed back’. Free speech supporters, who believed that it was their right to push it, put their lot behind AIB, who, instead of pushing the envelope back, slipped in an apology. In one stroke, they damaged free speech more than what the religious retards out to damage free speech could have done. They apologised to self-declared representatives of the Catholic community, but gave a booster shot to self-declared representatives of all shades. This will lead to more demands of more show cancellations, for more books pulped and more films censored. That’s the ugly reality that the AIB will have to face, when they come out of this controversy and go back to work. They had chosen the offensive genre, and had just about become pioneers of pushing the envelope.
They have been performing comedy and creating videos for quite some time now, but the AIB Knockout, a roast of mostly film celebrities, turned them into an overnight sensation worldwide. Their tasteless jokes were hailed as breaking new boundaries in humour in India. I’d earlier written about how I found most of their jokes repulsive and too offensive to watch. I was just one of the thousands who found their jokes racist, misogynist, homophobic and outright cheap, yet stood up for their right to crack them. Following Voltaire’s idea of free speech.
By the way, some of what they said is illegal in India. They knew it. There are many things that we do in the course of exercising our right to speech that crosses legal boundaries in this country. That’s how many laws have become redundant and the government is planning to prune them out of the books now. If a large number of citizens defy a law on a regular basis because it interferes with a Constitutional fundamental right, the law is made redundant over time. Some of the so-called reasonable restrictions are so vague they are unreasonable, and deserve to be removed from the statute altogether. Only if the citizens stand up for the same, that is.
So, should the AIB have gone to jail? They had not come to that bridge. The Maharashtra police, who filed cases against them, was itself under pressure from civil rights groups to not enter the moral policing zone. The so-called offended would have tried every law in the book to ensure that they did. The moral police was expected to build pressure in order to assert their moral superiority. They did the same to the film PK. Both Aamir Khan and director Rajkumar Hirani had to face vile abuse and protests, but they stood up for their work. They believed in it. This was perhaps the first time when a popular star had risked unpopularity to stand his ground. Bollywood is notorious for crawling when asked to bend. The AIB team was supposed to be the middle-finger-waving, devoid-of-a-single-damn-to-give-to-loony-losers bunch of new Indians, who had little or no respect for the self-appointed moral police inspectors. They disappointed those who stood up for them; those who stood by them. They had disappointed the rest by standing up in the first place.
We, as Indians, need to take a hard look at what we laugh at. Our sense of humour barely goes beyond poor jokes targeting women, obesity, the disabled, the poor and the downtrodden, the parochialism of Sardars, Madrasis and Biharis. AIB used the same jokes to laugh at our ridiculous stereotypes. While the Knockout gay jokes were hardly funny, it also normalised gay sex by making a celebrity come out, albeit under the garb of jokes. One of the roasters at the AIB Knockout, Abish Mathew, is Catholic, and took all the anti-Catholic jokes the way jokes are meant to be taken. They knew that those jokes would infuriate a section of Catholics, and definitely the priests. That was the whole point. One could take a swipe at religion; leave it smarting and helpless, because all the latter could have done was cry ‘my sentiments are hurt’. So? Big deal!
The apology from the AIB makes religion a no-go zone again. We cannot make fun of an imaginary god that nobody has seen, but we can laugh at real women, crack horrendous rape jokes, and ridicule the mute and the transgenders. The AIB apology draws the Lakshman Rekha for future comedians, who might have been inspired by the AIB to cross these arbitrary lines. It makes the envelope heavier. Too heavy to even try and push it again. Unless we have a new AIB, that is.
Do not push the envelope if you don’t have the scrotal strength to stand up when the envelope pushes back.