Reconstructing the funny side of life

You can’t grudge Yuki Ellias her quest for what’s funny. She says she often doesn’t get a joke until much later. “I want to know what people find funny, why they aspire to be funny themselves, and what funny is all about anyway,” says the theatreperson. Can’t blame Ellias. As she puts it, she is surrounded by comics, mostly in her family. Her father, well-known photographer Rafeeq Ellias, is apparently a laugh riot. Her mother, magazine editor Bina Sarkar, cracks her up. “Even my grandparents are funny people, though they don’t try to be,” says Ellias. “My grandmother is a lie-down comic. She’d be a stand-up if she could actually stand up.” In fact, asked to pick the craziest prop she would bring to a theatre workshop on comedy, Ellias deadpans: “My grandparents.”Well, Gramps and Granny Ellias weren’t available last week when Ellias organised the first of many workshops on comedy. But the event, in collaboration with the drama group The Theatre People, drew about 25 young actors to explore the funny side of life (and in some cases, the darkly comic one too). Participants were split into groups and given various props — a clown nose, a paper hat, masks and costumes — and asked to enact situations that they associate with humour. “It’s not necessarily about how we construct it, but how we observe the comedy around us, see a pattern and then try to construct it,” says Ellias, who taught drama in a London college till a few years ago. Each act threw up questions that the participants then debated and discussed. “Typically,” says Ellias, “the topics we talk about will lend themselves to ideas for future workshops and activities, which we then try to take forward.” Like, get this, the idea for the comedy workshop actually came out of an exercise on violence that Ellias had earlier undertaken with a bunch of her theatre friends. Calling themselves City Act, they had — in an earlier programme — tried to explore why people in Mumbai are aggressive/angry/violent. Still, Yuki can see humour in our everyday lives. In the situation where the canteen boy who delivers her tea at work struggles to pull out a naan khatai biscuit from the hip pocket of his tight trousers; in the bargaining that goes on every morning between vendor and customer in the local market, or even in the simple, and very Indian, act of slapping the forehead with a palm when we forget something.“It’s all commedia dell arte,” says the theatre major from the Ecole Jacques Le Coq in Paris, referring to a 19th century form of comedy theatre that originated in Italy, and could be called an early version of farce. “Like the Europeans, we have commedia in our bodies. We explore it at different levels every day in our lives.” Ellias believes comedy defines a culture - that different peoples have different ways of being funny, which comes from physicalities, hand gestures and, of course, the things they say. “The British like the Monty Python brand of humour, where they will do extreme things but in a measured way. The absurd contrast becomes funny,” says Ellias. “The Americans are all about the sit-com. They’re also all talk show hosts and stand-up comics, doing rat-a-tat one-liners and going at it for long periods at a stretch. In India, we’re good at talking about situations and story-telling, which is why it’s harder for us to do stand-up comedy. Though that tradition is also catching on.” Ellias thinks of herself as something of a humourist — she says she deals in funny all the time and dabbles in it sometimes without even realising. When not teaching it, Ellias is playing it out on stage. Some of her best roles have involved comedy — productions like The Typist, Noises Off and Tim Supple’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She defines herself, going back to the lexicon of French theatre, as a ‘comedienne’ rather than an actress.“An actress would do only serious stuff. She would not wear masks or jump around the stage trying to be funny. That’s not for me,” says Ellias. “But a comedienne could work in both serious and funny spaces, so that’s what I’d rather be.”  Her eye for the absurd has often helped Ellias pull off unimaginable stunts. In 2000, while in London, she was called in to choreograph a short piece in a stage production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. An otherwise weighty play, Ellias chose to spin her sequence with comedy. She made the burly prison guards do a little ballet. “Even the actors who were playing the roles were skeptical about it working,” says Ellias. But when the sequence turned out to be a side-splitter, Ellias knew she was on the right track. “We don’t give enough importance to funny,” says Ellias, adding that comedy can actually be many things to many people — an icebreaker, a way to win people over and reach out to others, instant gratification and mood-lifter. Yet, comedy rarely gets its due when it comes to theatre workshops and events, she says. Sadly.