Seriously funny political humour

The Soviets had just invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the Prague Spring pro-democracy movement. A year later, the Czechs were in the finals of the World Ice Hockey Championships against the Soviet team in Stockholm. The Czechs won 4-3, and there was wild jubilation at home. In response, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sent a telegram to the Czech President: ‘CONGRATULATIONS STOP OIL STOP GAS STOP’.

There have been political jokes for as long as there has been politics, but they really prove their true value when free speech is stifled by authoritarianism or in times of crisis. Which is why many Stalin-era jokes are being revived after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Like this one:

A Russian is entering Latvia, and his conversation with the border police goes like this:

“Nationality?”

“Russian.”

“Occupation?”

“No. Just visiting.”                                          

Today, humour and satire have become an even more powerful means of resistance against oppression because they are lubricated by memes, TikTok and YouTube spoofs. Authoritarian leaders lack a sense of humour, and have sent stand-up comedians, cartoonists, and satire columnists to jail, or even had them bumped off.

Yet, humorists fearlessly pour scorn on the oppressive state. An exception is perhaps what used to be the world’s largest democracy next door, where virtually no jokes exist about Narendra Modi.

Academics are also not known for their sense of humour, but two sociology professors from the South Asian University in New Delhi, Sasanka Perera and  Dev Nath Pathak recently published Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia: Anxiety, Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times with curated chapters on the role of political humour in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

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Nepal is not included, and a separate book may be needed to look at Nepal’s celebrity comedians during the Panchayat, Gai Jatra, Madan Krishna-Hari Bansha duo after 1992, Nepali cartoonists who defied military censorship after king Gyanendra’s coup in 2005, social media satire, and a controversial stand-up comedian.

Perera and Pathak’s book looks into the role of humour in theatre, folklore, journalism and social media serving as a force for regime change or safety valve in crisis times. This is serious stuff. What’s so funny, anyway?

Some of the chapters in the book are written by the two editors themselves, and others analyse the role of stand-up comedy in India, political cartoons, social media memes in Sri Lanka, and journalistic satire in Bangladesh.

The role of humour is to allow citizens to let off steam, to poke fun at people who are no fun at all. And as a form of resistance, it makes citizens lose some of their fear of authority. Humour then can reach a critical mass, and draw more crowds into the streets.

As the pro-democracy and anti-war demonstrations picked up in April 2006 on the streets of Kathmandu, the turning point came when a student at Khula Manch stood up from a crowd with a paper crown on his head, and did a parody of king Gyanendra’s speech (pictured). The roar of laughter from those around him proved that the fear was gone. The king restored parliament a few days later.

Sasanka Perera is from Sri Lanka, and his chapter delves into the subversive internet memes challenging political power. Social media mobilisation drove people to the Galle Face Green in Colombo earlier this year in protests that finally brought about the downfall of the Rajapaksa brothers.

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Perera and Pathak make a theoretical dissection of self-deprecating and subversive jokes, as well as those directed at belittling a people or their rulers on the other side of the border — like jokes in Bangladesh about Bengalis in India, or about Pakistanis by Indians.

‘In the context of political upheavals and disruptions which mark much of South Asia, it is no accident that political humour emerges, when democratic rights and personal freedoms are most seriously curtailed,’ they say in their joint introduction to the book.

The book also delves into why some satire is inherently funny, while others are considered ‘hitting below the belt’. Racist repartees may have been tolerated in the past, but have been unacceptable in the age of social media pushback.

Satire on social media has the power to set the national agenda, and steer debate on the public sphere. But it can also be misused to fan populism, racism and hatred.

The book does look tangentially at Nepal in a chapter by Sandhya A. S. and Chitra Adkar who analyse how Nepali workers are the butt of ‘jokes’ and stereotyped as being simple hillibillies, an image reinforced by Bollywood. They also examine the  Indian male gaze, and the perceived femininity of Gorkha security guards, drivers and domestic helpers from Nepal.

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‘Jokes about Nepali men circulated among Indian users of digital media draw a caricature of the Nepali men as naïve, simple and at times imbecilic or intellectually inferior,’ the authors write, adding that Indian men have inherited this sense of intellectual superiority from the way the British looked at Nepalis pre 1947.

What the authors do not go into is how Nepali workers in India get back with their own jokes about Indian employers. What do you think the Nepali guards and gardeners are laughing about when the saheb and memsaheb are out?

Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia is not a joke book, it is a book about jokes. Perera and Pathak have put together serious research on humour and satire as a coping mechanism and resistance in times of trouble.

Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia: 

Anxiety, Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times

Sasanka Perera and Dev Nath Pathak, eds. 

Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London and New Delhi, 2022

208 Pages, ISBN 9780367564018, Paperback: £27.99, Hardback: INR 995.00

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