Cursed is our world where shallow laughter has slayed catharsis
We want every programme to tickle us sadistically so that laughter trickles out every time we sit in front of our beloved idiot-box whose sole mission is to dumb us down to the level where we parrot the jugaats we hear to fix a friend who is wearing new tight pair of jeans or recently got married
You hear the jarring laughter roar through screens big and small. The anchor-cum-comedian-cum-intellectual-cum-clown-cum-psychoanalyst-cum-impossibly funny man has cracked, once again, a joke insanely funny that it has made the audience laugh so hard that they died and resurrected again for tenth time in under a minute. And they do it for another hour or two, the next day and the day after it, this week and every other week.
We all hear and enjoy the boisterous bits by laughing out loudly and then wait for the next hilarity and since there is no dearth of them we keep on consuming them mindlessly. The comedian, the clown and the witty lad make us laugh by abusing, ridiculing and mocking the other actor, audience or celebrities, politicians and other famous folks without even realising that we have become a society whose laughter has become devoid of delight or depth.
We hoot when we see someone being made fun of his missing leg, we howl when we hear the fictitious tale of elopement being attributed to someone’s sister, we savour the nasty innuendos, covertly-sexual insinuations and allusions that disparage another human being. We revel every time someone falls, every calamity that has befallen someone else is an opportunity to giggle at as it didn’t choose us to be its victim. Our glee, it seems, lies in all things abusive, shallow and horrid.
It seems that we have yet to learn or relearn how to laugh with the one who said or did something amusing and witty. The likes of Shakespeare, Shaw, Mushtaq Ahmed Yousafi or Ibn-e-Insha would fail (and have failed) to attract traction as they demand their reader to actively ponder what has been said rather than bombarding the criminally passive hoi polloi with all the trash talk and sheer gobbledygook. A very dear friend once told me a beautiful thing. He said, ‘Only the cowards and the ignorant use sarcasm, and if they don’t, people will know that how cowardly ignorant or ignorantly coward they are’.
What makes us tick, tells us a lot about ourselves. It divines our dreams; it prefigures our dilemmas.
I’ve been an avid reader of Reader’s Digest for more than a decade. They have a segment titled, ‘Laughter-The Best Medicine’ where readers from around the world send jokes or personal life experiences. Most of them are based on comic situations that life tosses our way, or things one finds hard to believe because they are so unexpected. While reading the Reader’s Digest one can’t escape the realisation that humour happens to real life ordinary people in real life ordinary situation. Humor is in and around us. All we need is to observe the incidents around us and observe things that shape our lives and be cheery of those interludes that dot our otherwise angst ridden existences.
What came in as a comic relief, peppered here and there, in otherwise serious talk shows has metamorphosed in an immortal monster that keeps on multiplying itself.
Putting comedians in the audience to get an occasional witty comment started as a fad couple of years back. We learned, quite unfortunately, that people love other people being made fun of in all ways grotesque rather than told how things are actually on the political front or what great injustice is currently ruining the lives of millions.
We hoot when we see someone being made fun of his missing leg, we howl when we hear the fictitious tale of elopement being attributed to someone’s sister, we savour the nasty innuendos, covertly-sexual insinuations and allusions that disparage another human being
We loathe tragedy as it aims to make its viewer ruminate all things transient and ephemeral. The death of hero tells us that life, no matter what happens or who perishes, marches on. Comedy gives us a breathing space so that we don’t keep on wallowing in the bottomless pit of sorrow and rue.
Well, dearest sirs and ma’ams, we’ve lost this sense of proportion. We want every programme to tickle us sadistically so that laughter trickles out every time we sit in front of our beloved idiot-box whose sole mission is to dumb us down to the level where we parrot the jugaats we hear to fix a friend who is wearing new tight pair of jeans or recently got married.
I went down the memory lane couple of weeks back, when I clicked on an old clip of Zia-Mohyuddin Show on Youtube. His guests were two nurses and Mushtaq Ahmed Yousafi, the ace humourist and last dinosaur of Urdu literature. During the whole show, Mr Yousafi kept on punching his one-liners, making witty observations, asking shrewd questions but not once did he degrade, humiliate or blurte out a sarcastic comment. Mr Yousafi is alive and writing. However, we don’t find his brand of humour ‘satisfying’ as it does not offer cheap laughs and shallow amusement.
TV, dear folks, has become a pacifier for those who find life nothing but a bundle of never-ending boredom. The monotony of existence, we religiously believe, can be best endured when one is either laughing his lungs out, shopping his wits out or dine his pockets out. Two hurrahs for our world that wants us to spend what we’ve earned and parade it in front of folks who failed and feel all haughty and super ‘classy’ about ourselves.
Till better, more sagacious angels of our nature come to the fore and rescue us from a world so dystopian that even the likes of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley would be thunderstruck and gawk around for saviours. Let us allow them ‘funny people’ to kill our souls, one joke at a time.
