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Humour in khadi: It’s a big joke!

The netas, who Jaspal Bhatti had spent his life parodying, were falling over one another to pay tribute to his work, and yet, tragically, few seemed to have an appreciation for real humour in politics.

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Maybe, it’s reading too much into it, but I was overwhelmed by a sense of irony when messages of condolences poured in from politicians after the death of funnyman Jaspal Bhatti. The netas, who Bhatti had spent his life parodying, were falling over one another to pay tribute to his work, and yet, tragically, few seemed to have an appreciation for real humour in politics.

Take the prime minister’s office, for instance. They were quick on the block to tweet their tribute — “Shri Bhatti’s work in using TV to hold up a mirror to the society and highlighting the problems of the common man will be remembered.”

It’s commendable that they weren’t holding Bhatti’s latest work against him — which includes using puppets of jailed politicians A Raja and Suresh Kalmadi along with Dr Manmohan Singh’s singing Aao scam karein-The Right To Scam.

Then again, they probably knew that most people weren’t listening to Bhatti anymore, but had moved on to the less-funny-more-angry Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal. So, it was okay to appreciate Bhatti’s humour but they couldn’t accept the thought of Twitter accounts parodying the prime minister. So low was the tolerance level for humour directed at the prime minister that the Government of India was willing to wage an e-war against Twitter and block the accounts of some nobodies with a few followers who were pretending to be Manmohan Singh.

Yes, the art of being funny is one which our politicians have never learned. Take, for instance, the man who always gets a few laughs from the janta — RJD boss Lalu Prasad Yadav. Mr Yadav loves to crack a few jokes, and having held the mike to him on several occasions, I can vouch for his verbal dexterity and quick comebacks.

But if you try to get his response to a dig someone else has taken at him, you risk getting your head bitten off. I once dared to ask him about Team Anna’s comment against him, Laluji got so angry and so red, he almost spat his paan juice on my face. So you can’t expect the neta to laugh unless the joke’s on someone else.

No wonder it was too much to expect Mamata Banerjee to appreciate the excellent send-up of Satyajit Ray’s classic Sonar Kella, featuring Dinesh Trivedi as the ‘Dushtu Lok’. The chief minister is very proud of her credentials as a prolific writer and artist, but she couldn’t stand the thought of Bengalis having a laugh at her expense. So, in true politician’s petulant style, she got hold of the first person she could — a Jadavpur University teacher — and sent him to jail for forwarding this joke. Of course, what’s unfortunate for Banerjee is that she’s ended up being a bigger joke by doing this.

Maybe, it’s not their fault. Maybe, they are right in assuming that their target audience doesn’t have a funny bone. That would explain what happened to Mani Shankar Aiyar last year. Aiyar, who considers himself a master of the English language, was regaling the audience with the idiosyncrasies of the Congress party.

Obviously, we know that to be true, so everyone laughed when Aiyar said the party was a bit like a “circus”. But it didn’t tickle his colleagues in the party and as the word spread via media, Aiyar’s joke faded into the corners of the grim disciplinary committee of the party and he was forgiven only after he “clarified” his remarks. When he expressed his apprehension about the Congress’s capacity to laugh at itself, he was told by his colleague Satyavrat Chaturvedi: “I am neither the joker nor the trapeze artiste at the circus, but the caged lion.”

So that laid to rest any other attempt at humour by any other party man. It’s not just the Congress, even other politicians don’t want to venture near a joke or be quoted making one in public. Once, in Parliament, a young MP was hanging around the exit waiting for his car, when a senior leader  happened to come by. Seeing them in the same frame, photographers clicked them till the senior leader moved towards the car. “Oh, I was so enjoying our photos,” ribbed the young MP, “Why are you leaving? Don’t you want to be photographed with me?” They both shared a laugh and I thought it was an interesting exchange, so I tweeted about it.

So far, so good, till the young MP made desperate calls to me the next day. “How dare you?” he shouted. “Look, it’s no big deal,’’ I said. I couldn’t figure out why he was so agitated. “I thought it was fun, and so I wrote about it.” “You made me look like a real wannabe, hanging around trying to get a picture taken!” I tried to explain there was no such thing, that it was funny, and that he was refreshingly funny. But the MP was so agitated that I agreed to delete my tweets. Obviously, his own sense of humour seemed lost on him.

As we mark the passing of Jaspal Bhatti, the man who evolved from Doordarshan of the 80s to social networking sites like Twitter in the 21st century, here’s hoping that our politicians also see the evolution of being funny. The young BJP MP Anurag Thakur, in a tribute to Jaspal Bhatti, tweeted that he “taught us how to laugh at ourselves without fear”. I hope the fear stays well away from at least the new generation of netas.

Sunetra Choudhury is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News
On Twitter: @sunetrac

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