HYDERABAD: For the second column in a row, I’m forced to write about a comedian. If there is one thing you need to know about comedians, it’s how much they hate talking about other (more famous) comedians.
In his controversial monologue, Vir Das said there are ‘two Indias’ and looks like we’re hellbent on proving that there’s just one India — that bans and cancels comedy shows. Oh, I miss the days when angry trolls and fringe organisations were busy targeting Bollywood stars and films. Remember when
Padmaavat got flack?
Those truly were the good days. Not because it was someone else’s art form (yes I called Bollywood art), but because the people who were in the controversy were watching it unfold from their untouchable high castles, comfortably sipping a martini (just what I think actors drink), protected by a team of overqualified lawyers who told them to drop the ‘i’ from the name and mint the same amount of money.
Munawar Faruqui and Kunal Kamra — despite being some of the ‘biggest comedians’ (gulps) in the country -- are far from that. Both of them have seen their sold-out shows get cancelled over the last week in Bengaluru. Just a few weeks before that, a show was called off because a group of people threatened to ‘self immolate’ if the show went on.
The argument against these comedians has always been that they are ‘hurting sentiments’ and that ‘they should do comedy like Kapil Sharma’, who never hurts sentiments. Now, even if we choose to overlook the unapologetic sexism, men dressed as women, mediocre skits, copied jokes, paid audience, laugh tracks, a tabla backing punchlines and a dedicated person with a mic to laugh, we need to understand that all comedy hurts someone’s sentiments if you want it to.
Every joke ever cracked has been at someone’s expense (including the haathi-cheeti jokes that offend elephants) if you chose to overlook the fact that it is a ‘joke’. Oxford Dictionary defines the word ‘joke’ as ‘something that you say or do to make people laugh’ — LAUGH. If you don’t laugh, trust me, the comedian is already having a worse evening than you.
Comics now walk a tightrope between getting beaten up by the Right and cancelled by the Left, and if we keep up this ‘we hate laughing’ attitude, they’ll be left with just two options. First, strangle their comedy career with that tight rope. Or, the second — the far worse option — buy a salwar kameez/fake moustache to play the opposite gender on The Kapil Sharma Show. Trust me, you don’t want to see me in a salwar kameez.
(Bhavneet is a stand-up comedian and this may be his new material. The views are personal)