Spare a few laughs, don't be so serious

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Spare a few laughs, dont be so serious

We are mistaking humour for mockery, malice, hurtfulness, and all this is not likely to change in a hurry

By Bikram Vohra (Between the lines)

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Published: Thu 23 Feb 2017, 9:30 PM

Last updated: Thu 23 Feb 2017, 11:31 PM

Humour makes people uncomfortable. It forces them to face their fears and that is never easy.
Next week this time I will be addressing a convention in New Delhi on humour as a fourth estate and political weapon.
This is a two-day affair and I am deathly afraid that no one will be able to display the staying power. Humour is not about telling jokes. It is a way of life and one only slightly nutty people pursue. Two full days of humour is a very rich diet.
What anyone says might not make any difference to the inability of the human race to find laughter a delight. Instead, it is seen as a very volatile emotion and one that still mystifies most of us. We are not yet that civilised as to harness its power and its gentle beauty and grace.  
In fact we still are primitive enough to laugh 'at' rather than laugh 'with'. In recent times as personal and professional insecurities overwhelmed us, this lack of self-deprecation has made us even more thin skinned and unable to take it on the chin. Consequently, mistaking humour for mockery, malice, hurtfulness and insult is still the norm and won't change in a hurry.
This is why most publications slug anything vaguely funny as 'humour' so the reader catches on. The line between humour per se and taking offence is almost invisible. And once crossed widens into a chasm.
We still see humour, the grand distillation of the absurdities inherent in the homosapiens experiment as something trivial. Not exactly possessing gravitas. Which is why laughter in many Asian societies is seen as an embarrassment or a display of bad manners. Women, for example, still cover their mouths with their hands when they swallow their laughter. People giggle and titter and hold back because loud laughter lacks finesse.
Certainly, people who spend their lives trying to see the silly side of things are a little mad in the head. This is an acceptable premise because their insight is largely abnormal and humour, by its very nature, is tinged with sadness.
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. And so, too, is much truth said in jest.
That one would voluntarily expose oneself to potential ridicule by being funny has to be psychologically questioned. Comedians, stand-up comics, humorists, per se, all live in perpetual fear of being found out, what if no one laughs. Yet, trapped in our own mental make-up we soldier on deeper into the woods literally asking for it.
It is so much easier to be solemn and serious than it is to take the truth and play with it like a child does with plasticine or dough, turning it into various shapes while still retaining the core.
Think of it this way. A child smiles 150 to 400 times a day. An adult smiles 15 times in that time span. What happens as we grow that we shed that spontaneity of laughter and reduce the number so drastically. Reality, life, the trials of the daily grind, all these and more, take their toll.
Perhaps, but there is more to it than just that.
As technology has taken over our lives we have become more sensitive and inclined towards taking slight. The more we are sidelined and put on the bench or live our lives through others and the prism of social platforms and mobile phones, the more we will distance ourselves from the cleansing influence of laughter. The little we knew of ourselves has also vanished.
As we canter on the treadmill to eternity without getting anywhere but breathless, here are three reasons for our hostility to laughter.
We are increasingly ignorant of our traditions, religions and culture. So, to cover our ignorance we become foot soldiers at the gate ready to fight the good fight to camouflage our lack of knowledge.
The second group believes they are experts on these issues and, therefore, become defenders of the faith, taking on all comers.
The third category is exploitative and will take a harmless comment and balloon it into an indictment.
Not for them the frivolities of a good laugh which rids you of the cobwebs and makes you feel alive.
All three share a common cerebral value system. They are afraid that if they do not take themselves seriously no one else will. Hence, out goes humour, the first casualty seen as self-indulgence.
Would they be surprised if they knew that you have a 30 per cent less chance of suffering illness as in cardiac problems and cancer if you can laugh a few times a day, not guffaws that hurt people, but just be able to see the whacky side of things.
Actually, even ethnic jokes at one time, until someone discovered they were politically incorrect and turned them into hatred, brought people together which is what genuine humour does. It does not divide and it does not make you feel bad about yourself.
When did it all start going wrong? Is it the stark nature of our lives, filled with quiet despair and roadblocks that made laughter obscene and inappropriate? That element combined with a need to hold together our fragile egos and not let them collapse like a house of cards has made laughter an ill wind and if we let it in, it might blow the house down.
Recently, I did a funny piece (or so I thought) on doctors and lawyers being the only people who practice all the time, by playing on the word). Imagine my horror when several thousand doctors began signing a petition demanding an apology. It was warm, it was fuzzy, it was written with affection, it was related to me by a doctor himself who told his patients 'oh I am only practicing, I can't promise a cure' and that made them feel more at ease.
Yet, it got totally misunderstood, and in here lays the fracture in the equation. These highly qualified doctors could not rise above a mere column with a smiley emoticon and a slug saying 'humour.' Should their rage not have been targeted at more tangible targets? We seem to have become so fragile and prickly. The medical profession would not have been endangered by a funny ha, ha piece of 400 words.
The same profession is on record as saying that laughter stimulates memory, promotes alertness, generates good health, improves digestion, and is as beneficial as exercise and makes a person more productive.
But they couldn't laugh at themselves. Much of the change has also come about because the greyness of our lives precludes the colour of laughter. We apologise for it. Our history kicks in. Humour's urban roots lie in physical disabilities and have always been suspect. Rural equivalents were more honest, robust, extremely funny, and have now been sanitised by the city influence.
A generation that hides behind designations and uses status symbols for armour to cover its flaws can never find space for happy laughter.
I once asked, why can we not say 'he died'? What's this expired stuff, he wasn't a jar of strawberry jam on a supermarket shelf. We say, 'he went to his heavenly abode' like he booked a suite.  It went wrong. People around were uncomfortable. I was being crude and coarse and insensitive.
That's the curse of humour. You never know when it will go awry.
Bikram Vohra is a former editor at Khaleej Times


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