It felt surreal to find Ravish Kumar on NDTV's Hindi channel speak about Trevor Noah. Suddenly the living rooms of Ravish's prime time audience were alive with Noah's unstoppable humor which seem to be pumping up an animated Joe Biden with an insane amount of laughing gas. Interestingly, oftentimes the butt of the joke was President Biden himself. Yet, the 81-year-old leader found it within his ambit to be a good sport.
In 2015, Trevor Noah, the stand-up comedian and South African television icon succeeded the longtime host Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, a satirical news program on Comedy Central. And seven years later, here he was, the 37-year-old Noah, invited to do a skit at the White House Correspondents' dinner. Poking fun at the President's many policies as well as the complacency of media, Noah was as much at home as his audience.
The above example just goes on to illustrate that a vibrant democracy embraces criticism at the apical level. Here is a non-American, who is not even a citizen of the country, making fun of the highest authority of the nation in his presence and on his turf. To envision a similar scenario in our country steeped in a culture which encourages an almost groveling and reverential attitude towards the powers that be, is chimerical.
To be able to expose the hypocrisy of a society, amnesia of a system or short-sightedness of a leader through humour sometimes may be the most effective means to get one's point through. The front page editorial cartoons in the newspapers worldwide, for example, have long been considered representational of the publications' respective socio-political leanings, and often succeed in mouthing more than the editorial or the articles on op-ed page can.
While political satire is as old as the Greeks, stand-up comedy is a twentieth century phenomenon where a comedian addresses a live audience. Even though India has had its fair share of popular satirists in artists such as Kaka Hathrasi, Ashok Chakradhar, Safdar Hashmi, Pradip Chaube and Alhar Bikaneri, stand-up comedy has made its foray onto the Indian stage only a decade and a half ago. Artists like Kunal Kamra, Varun Grover, Hasnein Sheikh, Vir Das and Munawar Faruqui have not only become household names, but were once considered a force to reckon with.
Lately however, this business of being funny is becoming less and less funny. Awkward
silences or an audience that is not in on the joke is one thing, fragile egos with easily-hurt sentiments, quite another. While the former might land the artist in an embarrassing situation, the latter could land him/her behind bars. The truth being that along with the risk of content-crackdown or a show-cancellation, there is always the realtime apprehension of being sued. And it is this which is driving several comedians to run their stand-up videos by lawyers before uploading them on social media, just to be on safer grounds. "Getting shot dead while performing is not out of the realm of impossibility anymore. A slap on stage is quite a mild thing in comparison," remarks Grover on the mishaps of being a stand-up comedian in India.
Whoever said, 'Laughter is the Best Medicine'?
Are you serious?
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