In pursuit of true comedy
Without pain, there is nothing worth living for. It’s the most essential ingredient of human accomplishment. Whether it’s the great pyramids of Egypt — which were the tallest human-built structure for close to 4000 years — or the smartphone you are reading this on, somebody suffered somewhere to ensure these final products. In fact, the size of an achievement doesn’t really matter. Human suffering has to be like oxygen in every temporal endeavour: silent, necessary and priceless. Show me one good thing out there which doesn’t have anything bad attached to it, staring at it from behind the scenes.
If you are in India, it doesn’t take long for a shrouded tragedy to convert into a naked comedy. Things work weirdly here. We are a modern country with a medieval backbone held up by an ancient soul. We gather around two men arguing on the street, not because we want to hear what they are saying, but to anticipate the quarrel turning into a full-fledged fight. We can’t miss action. Entertainment is pivotal to our existence. Long before Aryabhatta came up with his history-bending nothingness called zero, our society invented gossip. We were so damn engrossed in it that we pivoted to create thousands of languages and dialects to cover gossip. Far and wide. Our ancestors had seen everything, gone through everything, and most spectacularly, survived everything. We are their children and it’s a matter of shame as well as pride. In case you follow the news and ever wonder to yourself what went wrong, let me tell you this with utmost sincerity: nothing.
A lot of strange things have happened during the (ongoing) pandemic in this (discontinued) lockdown. Pandemic is everywhere. Lockdown is for those who aren’t selfish and actually care about others. Anyway, going back to the first sentence of this paragraph, Norm Macdonald has become one of my favourite comedians. Earlier, I used to find him testy and ridiculously edgy. Not anymore. Thanks to staying at home for over six months at a stretch has taught me how beautifully crafted his comedy is. Patience is lost on those who are in a hurry to go nowhere. What distinguishes a great comedian from a good comedian is the reach of his material and the courage in his words. Turns out Macdonald has plenty of both. While parsing through his stand-up and talk show appearances on YouTube, I realized that he fucks around with his audiences. In other words, he treats his comedy as a superpower. Imagine Superman lifting you up, soaring towards the sky, and dropping you, and just as you are about to hit the ground, he catches you again. That’s exactly what Macdonald does with his flow.
Take his moth joke for a meandering study of his art.
A moth goes into a podiatrist’s office, and the podiatrist’s office says, “What seems to be the problem, moth?”
The moth says “What’s the problem? Where do I begin, man? I go to work for Gregory Illinivich, and all day long I work. Honestly doc, I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t even know if Gregory Illinivich knows. He only knows that he has power over me, and that seems to bring him happiness. But I don’t know, I wake up in a malaise, and I walk here and there… at night I…I sometimes wake up and I turn to some old lady in my bed that’s on my arm. A lady that I once loved, doc. I don’t know where to turn to. My youngest, Alexendria, she fell in the…in the cold of last year. The cold took her down, as it did many of us. And my other boy, and this is the hardest pill to swallow, doc. My other boy, Gregarro Ivinalititavitch… I no longer love him. As much as it pains me to say, when I look in his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I… that I catch when I take a glimpse of my own face in the mirror. If only I wasn’t such a coward, then perhaps…perhaps I could bring myself to reach over to that cocked and loaded gun that lays on the bedside behind me and end this hellish facade once and for all…Doc, sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I’m a moth, just barely hanging on to my web with an everlasting fire underneath me. I’m not feeling good. And so the doctor says, “Moth, man, you’re troubled. But you should be seeing a psychiatrist. Why on earth did you come here?”
And the moth says, “‘Cause the light was on.”
Since we are on the subject of humour, let’s dig in a bit and ask ourselves a very primal question: why do kids laugh when somebody falls? As adults, you must have seen this happen and as kids, you must have done it yourself. Children are the first ones to let out a chuckle when somebody trips in front of them. It’s disturbing to acknowledge these little human beings are supposed to be the embodiment of innocence, the purest of pure, and they are also the one who take immense delight in somebody else’s agony. No, the cartoons they watch aren’t to be blamed here. Yes, cartoons do exaggerate a fall and build a rapport with their young audiences but the desire to laugh runs deeper. My conclusion, for now, is stuck between two areas of compromise: firstly, comedy is the art of hiding despair and secondly, somebody has to fall so others can rise in joy. Anything that makes us exhibit the privates of our mouth causes discomfort to somebody somewhere. Even the best of writers, be them of any genre, hide their pain so as to nudge happiness out of their consumers.
Once I move to Mangalore, I’ll try standup comedy. No kidding. If not in front of a live audience, at least record a video or something. The only reason I didn’t give it a try is because I am scared of people. Entertaining strangers or gaining approval appear on my not-to-do list. However, I am keen on trying new(er) stuff once I move south.
This is how my first material might sound like — imagine Farhan Akhtar’s voice after he had a bad bout of sinus. Nope, I won’t start with the whole warming-up-the-crowd nonsense. As soon as I enter the stage (video), I’ll get down to business.
Do you ever see a pigeon and wonder what are they doing in your city? No, right? That’s because they were in that city long before you showed up there. Seriously. Pigeons were one of the first migrants of the 20th century. As soon all the major wars ended, they retired and left for the cities. During wartime, they were the heroes, delivering critical messages to the army generals, dodging bullets, escaping soldiers and whatnot. Some even got bravery medals and all. Dogs have taken their place now.
Anyway, that was then.
As of today, they are homeless but are too proud to build a nest on a fucking tree. They will build a shitty nest in your residential building and give birth to shitty kids and when that is done, they will go around shitting on your cars and bikes. What a freaking downfall for a species. From being breaking news messengers to war heroes to being utterly shitty. (Actually, this punchline would sound better if delivered in Hindi and using the chaste scatological term.)
Similarly, I also feel bad for chickens. There are more chickens in the world than any other bird species. Yes, they are there just to be eaten. But if you go back in history and trace the pathway of their evolution, you’ll be amazed to learn that they have a direct linkage to dinosaurs. In fact, chickens are the closest surviving relative to T-Rex.
Yup.
No joke.
The joke is somewhere else though: chickens survived all of that asteroid drama only to end up on our plates so that some bald Maharashtrian fellow can say “chicken leg piece” and score stupid firang followers.
At this point, the camera will focus on my eyes because there will be a flash of pain in them. Just the sort Roger Dangerfield had whenever he delivered an awesome joke.
I always had respect for termites, bees and ants. But after reading about fire ants, my respect for these ants species has grown at least 500 times. Just like a uterus does during pregnancy. They are incredibly resilient. No force of nature can singularly destroy them. Although they are called fire ants because of their acidic jabs, they are known to withstand wildfire too. During floods and hurricanes, they hang onto each other, building a living raft that floats for miles. They manage to fulfill such amazing feats for a very simple reason: they care for each other. And if humans were 1/100th as smart as we think we are, we’d have looked out for each other.
Last week, the world celebrated Gandhi Jayanti. Or as the global community calls it, International Day of Non-Violence. At our apartment, we were discussing various facets of Gandhiji and a question arose about what it means to be a Gandhian in today’s era. Several names were mentioned but none of them came close to Ranga. As far as the spirit of Gandhi is concerned, he not only manifests it, he literally embodies it. This old guy is a staunch pacifist. Violence isn’t for him. We’ve seen him in fights with fellow street dogs and not once had he bitten back. He just runs in the direction of the house. Which doesn’t mean that Gandhism is equivalent to cowardice. No. On the contrary, it showcases how dedicated Ranga is to his beliefs. He won’t change for others. Maybe that’s something we can learn from him.
Say what you may about Kissinger and his colossally damaging impact on the second half of the 20th century, there is one aspect we can’t take away from him: he knew exactly what he was doing. Perhaps the people he was advising didn’t know but he did. His career graph is an exhibition of self-preservation amid the thick throes of politics. Being somebody classical erudite, he played everybody like a chess piece. In a 1958 interview, he synonymed capitalistic society with free society, before hyping it to be a bigger revolutionary phenomenon than socialism. This from a man who belonged to the tribe of German Jews. Anyway, he is 97 now and I wonder who is going to be his successor.
Different prison systems in different countries adhere to different principles to extract different behaviours from their inmates. For instance, in some Latin American countries, earning a degree helps you reduce your incarceration period. Similarly, in some affluent European countries, good behaviour (read: non-aggression) leads to quicker rehabilitation. In Africa, there are penal laws that support sport participation in prison to such an extent that making it to the ‘A’ team is highly coveted for obvious reasons. But this approach doesn’t always work. A couple of years ago, Romania introduced a law that allowed prisoners to reduce their sentences by 30 days for each book they wrote. The idea was to increase prison literacy rate but the law didn’t last long because some smartass wrote a book in seven hours straight. It created a minor uproar for two causes: people wanted to know who this mini-Stephen King was and secondly, who is to decide what exactly is a book? Anybody who can write anything they like to fill up the pages, no? Asking for a cure.
The hero of our story doesn’t sleep well. He goes through these phases more religiously than the moon goes through her gibbous. Some months ago, his sleeplessness was so acute that he started hallucinating. If there was a narrator with a voice as pristine as Anthony Hopkins’, we would be hearing — “He deserves this.” There is no escape from his own design. Those who sleep well don’t realize how fortunate they are. Very similar to those who have all their limbs don’t realize how difficult life can be with even one finger missing. A person who sleeps for 8-10 hours a night has nothing to complain about, and yet they do once they wake up.
