I have always been fascinated by stories and more specifically, by funny stories. In India we have had a long history of humorous stories from every part of India. I used to marvel at Birbal's wit and presence of mind when I would hear how he managed to outwit the king each time. Gopal Bhaand, Tenalirama and Sheikh Chilli - who was born in Pakistan & eventually moved to Haryana are other humorists who have influenced what tickled our funny bone then.Every King had court jesters. With over five hundred princely courts imagine the number of jesters and wits there would have been. But why do we not hear about the others? I have often wondered whether we have evolved on this front. At the outset I must confess that I find the Comedy Circus variety of humor to be somewhat crass and actually not so funny despite loud thigh slapping laughter by the hosts/judges to convince us that if you aren't laughing out loud, you haven't got the joke. Yet humor is never intended to appeal to everyone. there is rarely a joke that everyone finds funny.
Humor is very situation specific and context specific. What you find funny as a ten year old may not be so when you are older. Some humor is specific to a region or social class. Each language has its own notion of humor as does each class of society. The breadth of humor one appreciates is a by product of the extent of exposure one has had to people who are different. As Indians have become more confident, we have learned to laugh at ourselves.Only someone who is secure within can laugh at himself or herself. Self deprecating humor is reflective of a self assured person. I believe economic prosperity and exposure to a global environment have expanded the variety of jokes we laugh at today. You see more comedy shows on TV than we did a few years back. YouTube and the Net has given us access to more brands and flavors of humor. So as a country we are discovering the joys of a global fare.
Humor is a double edged knife. The extent of its impact is directly proportional to the number of people who hear/ watch/ read your brand of humor. The more homogeneous the audience the easier it is to predict or at least gauge their response to the humor and make course corrections. Each nation or culture has its sacred cows. These subjects are taboo for the majority of the audience. When anyone makes fun of these, they risk angering the majority. However many stand up comedians draw their humor from these edgy topics like political ideology, religion, sexuality, etc. When public opinion goes against a particular person or topic, that is a prime subject for a nudge :) If you are writing for an audience, you have to know what tickles their funny bone just as much as you need to know would they find it boring or annoying or repetitive etc. Humorists have to quickly get a pulse of the audience or the viewer.
Humor is all about making fun of our vulnerabilities. If you are good as a humor writer, you would most certainly offended someone who is the butt of jokes. One of the Professors of Mathematics at XLRI had told me I had caricatured him unfairly in my book Mediocre But Arrogant. A short story about the futility of New Year resolutions drew the flak of a colleague who claimed that the work-shirking, scheming person in the story was modeled on him. At the alumni meet of XLRI last December, a classmate came up and said that the character of Ayesha in Married But Available was modeled on her and that she didn't quite like that.I like to draw cartoons and caricatures. Most people feel a little annoyed with caricatures of themselves and will politely tell you that the resemblance is missing. They expect a flattering portrait - not a poke. So I have learned the hard way to avoid drawing caricatures of people unless they ask me to. It is always harder to draw cartoons of people who are good looking. So if I have to avoid drawing the cartoon of someone, I always tell them that they are far too good looking to be caricatured. That always works. But when I
read recently that in August, masked gunmen beat Ali Farzat, a Syrian cartoonist, renowned throughout the Arab world, breaking two fingers on his drawing hand and his right arm after he published a cartoon showing President Bashar Al-Assad hitching a ride out of town with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi just before he was toppled from power, I decided I am not brave enough to handle such treatment..
Can we label something as typical Indian Humor? Every nation or a race makes fun of some other race or country until they feel secure enough to also laugh at themselves. The more secure a group is the less sensitive they are about what is being made fun of. I believe the brand of humor is an outcome of the worldview one has. A mother in law joke has less appeal to a school kid than it has to a married person. A joke about Tiger Woods would make no sense to someone who does not know about him beyond his life as a golfer. If you have never heard a Chinese person speak, you will never understand the humor behind someone mimicking their accent. There are far more shades of humor shared among close friends than there are in public. We also tend to accept more edgy humor from a person who everyone finds funny. If everyone is laughing at Russel Peters' jokes, then more people will laugh just to fit in.
The flavor of humor varies dramatically in a country as diverse as India. Jokes or anecdotes about other castes, professions, rich people (usually misers) etc all succeed because they play on popular stereotypes. I have had friends from the North Eastern states of India who have a very distinctly different brand of humor than the people from other states. Kerala has produced more cartoonists than any other state. There is huge repertoire of humorous stories in Bengali that I have grown up with. I have read and heard a great variety of humor in the Hindi language that is very specific to the social scene of the Hindi belt. We have a common pool of jokes about regional stereotypes. Think of all the jokes about Mallus, Bongs, Sardars, Marwaris, Gujjus, Parsis... the list goes on. Humor is about the ability to tap into our vulnerabilities and insecurities. We all enjoy laughing at what makes others vulnerable.What is the one thing that makes you laugh?---------------You may like the article in NY Times that says why Political Humor is IncendiaryRead the article on Page 7 of the DNA Newspaper dated 8th August 2010
Humor is very situation specific and context specific. What you find funny as a ten year old may not be so when you are older. Some humor is specific to a region or social class. Each language has its own notion of humor as does each class of society. The breadth of humor one appreciates is a by product of the extent of exposure one has had to people who are different. As Indians have become more confident, we have learned to laugh at ourselves.Only someone who is secure within can laugh at himself or herself. Self deprecating humor is reflective of a self assured person. I believe economic prosperity and exposure to a global environment have expanded the variety of jokes we laugh at today. You see more comedy shows on TV than we did a few years back. YouTube and the Net has given us access to more brands and flavors of humor. So as a country we are discovering the joys of a global fare.