Be it women in a suffocating patriarchal household, or subordinates in regimented offices, or citizens in a fascistic political order, what is it that irks authority figures the most?
Surely not rational argument, democratic mobilisation for rights, even violent rebellion – these are modes of protest that are easily snuffed out through sophistry, or deflection, or use of state agencies, or straightforward deployment of highhanded apparatus.
What disorients and disarms the bully most is laughter.
When a woman in a male-dominated social order laughs back at a self-appointed major domo, she petrifies his sense of self-importance.
Patriarchy associates a woman’s bold laughter with a “brazen” expression of her sexuality. What could be more distressing for the macho oppressor?
Conversely, nothing liberates the woman more than the act of laughing in the face of a bullying idiot.
The blow thus rendered to male gumption makes any subsequent punishment a reward rather than defeat.
Likewise, if in a spat with your brainless boss, you manage to laugh back at any one of his senseless diktats, you win the battle of being, even if you lose your job.
Same with much larger structures of authoritarian closure.
Switch to that magnificent book by Umberto Eco, titled The Name of the Rose.
Set in a Benedictine abbey in Italy in 1327, the novel enacts the saga of serial murders of priests within the monastery.
Where even the Inquisition fails to unravel the truth of these assassinations, it takes a clever priest to investigate and expose the enormity.
He discovers that all those murdered ones had a powdery residue on their index fingers and within their mouths.
He also discovers that all the victims had been attempting to clandestinely enter a remote and forbidden part of the library in the Abbey.
As he manages to outwit the librarian charged with denying anyone entry into the forbidden room, he finds, buried under many books, a book with a similar powdery substance on its edges below where a searcher’s fingers might attempt to turn a page.
Eureka, eureka; the powdery substance after all is a poison meant to keep the curious interloper from accessing the book.
So, you may well ask what book this was after all:
Dear reader, the book in question was the second part of Aristotle’s Poetics, given to enunciating the virtues of laughter!
To wit, the regime of the Abbey feared nothing more than the probability of any questioning Johnny taking to laughter at Church authority.
All that may bring home to us what deadly serious business comedy can be, and why the Kunal Kamras of this misbegotten world are no simple jokers but mortal antagonists to fascistic systems of oppression where all other citizen stratagems to ward off the state’s total collapse into dictatorship fail.
Not for nothing has it been said that “laughter is the best medicine” – even when it comes to politics, we may add.
Dear reader, do laugh.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
