How Renuka Chowdhury could have laughed to avoid offending Modiji
The PM compared Renuka Chowdhury's laughter to that of Shoorpnakha.
A laugh became the subject of national debate. Laughter was used as a weapon. What followed was a humourless debate about laughter. It had a hollow ring to it.
Institutions are always clamping down on laughter. Libraries will put on their shelves books that claim to make you laugh out loud. If you do burst out laughing on reading a sentence, the librarian will throw you out. As the humourist HL Mencken said: “The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months; if it was not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.”
We are an unserious society which pretends to be serious. Laughing subtracts from our pretence of seriousness. Everybody goes around with a serious demeanour, starting with the school headmaster.
In fact, school is a good place to observe our attitudes to laughter. This is where we are schooled to laugh, or not to. An acquaintance of mine became the headmaster of a school. He’s given up smiling altogether.
He now spends his living days, walking around a vast campus, a drop-dead-grim expression on his face, shoulders drooping prematurely, hands clasped behind back. Whether he is supervising the mali or ticking off students and staff, his visage is unchangingly apocalyptic. At times I want to throw a pebble and see if there are any ripples in the lake.
It’s in schools that we learn to laugh obsequiously to keep a tyrannical teacher happy; we learn to titter at a classmate’s humiliation. We are not taught to laugh at ourselves, the kernel of genuine laughter.
Indians get angry a fair bit. Try cracking a joke in an interminable queue or in a crowded situation— it won’t work. At most, it elicits a quick smile, which is suppressed as quickly—a pursed smile, not a full-throated laugh.
I have a full-throated laugh that some find embarrassing, not least the person who initiated a joke. Someone tells me a joke and I throw back my head and let out a guffaw. This makes the person a touch self conscious (especially when there are people around) and she mutters to me: "It was not that funny."
Stand-up comedy gives us a readymade outlet for laughter. It’s like humanity decided that we must "loosen up" and laugh. It’s good for health. We troop to an auditorium and we laugh because we are supposed to laugh. Capitalism has made it easier to laugh. The canned laughter on sitcoms prompts us to laugh at the right "scripted" moment.
Authentic laughter happens when we least expect it. Laughter is the best medicine not when it is scripted, but when you can see humour in a situation that would pull others down into depression. Laughing in a sinking moment props you up and others too, if they’re so inclined.
We Indians also have a problem with laughing at all the wrong moments, especially in films. In Anurag Kashyap’s Raman Raghav 2.0 the audience laughed at the mannerisms of the serial killer. In Brokeback Mountain we laughed when gay cowboys patted each other affectionately on the bum.
No surprise then that humour writing never really took off in India. No humourist of the stature of HL Mencken or SJ Perelman took root. The time-pass humour of Ms Funnybones does the job for us, week after week.
East UP Hindi has a humour manoeuvre called “jhela dena.” The point of this is to scuttle the joke-maker’s joke and turn that act of scuttling into an object for humour. Someone cracks a joke, following which you maintain a studiedly straight face. The joke’s on the other person while you’ve had the last laugh.
With the advent of emojis we’ve stopped laughing altogether. Earlier the joke required a teller. And a listener. The listener might "jhela do" the teller in the process but laughter was very much a physical transaction of words and gestures.
The assortment of laughter emojis at our disposal means that laughter has been digitised. If we don’t want to pick a smiley from online text-messaging supermarkets we simply write: "Hahaha". How hard you’re laughing is represented by how many ha's you suffix. This means we don’t laugh at all anymore. Instead of laughing naturally, we get busy categorising and choosing the pictorial symbol that will precisely and best represent the scale of our laughter. By then the laugh has passed you by.
Coming back to the question of strategic pealing laughter and parliamentary decorum, one could look at deploying cardboard hand-held signs, the kind seen in giggly chat shows like Vogue BFFs and Koffee With Karan.
Modiji makes a remark, which Renukaji finds laughably absurd. Instead of screeching a real-time guffaw, she could hold up a small placard: "Lol". Modiji makes another claim, which she doubts, and so she picks up the next one on her table: the yellow smiley with the Eid crescent as its mouth. The PM makes a grand assertion that she finds utterly outrageous. Renukaji picks up the last resort: "Hahahahahahaha". Democratic decorum will thus be maintained while allowing everyone to express themselves.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)