Comedian Robin Williams said, “Satire is not dead; it lives in the White House”, and America laughed. Comedian Kunal Kamra, in a show titled ‘Naya Bharat’ in Mumbai on March 23, referred to Maharashtra deputy chief minister Eknath Shinde as ‘gaddar’ (traitor) and Shiv Sena vandalized his stage. Satire is not dead; it lives all over India. And the increasing intolerance to satire is testimony to its potency, how the humourless political class sees it as a threat.
It’s difficult to say which party feels less insecure in the face of political humour. On Feb 15, the Union govt blocked Tamil media group Vikatan’s website for publishing a cartoon that showed Prime Minister Narendra Modi in shackles sitting next to US president Donald Trump (in the context of US deporting Indians in chains). In March 2023, Tamil Nadu police arrested Pradeep, a 24-year-old man, for sharing a video meme that poked fun at a state budget announcement. In 2012, Bengal police arrested Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra for forwarding a cartoon that made fun of the Trinamool Congress member Dinesh Trivedi’s removal as railway minister. In 2020. Sameet Thakkar, a social media commentator, was arrested for calling Uddhav Thackeray a ‘modern day Aurangzeb’ and his son Aditya Thackeray a ‘baby penguin’.
Satire shares a thin boundary with insult, and the ones less skilled in the art often find themselves on the wrong side of the line. All the above cases, however, are examples of political intolerance. A simple way to distinguish between insult and humour is to see if it makes you think after you’ve laughed. A sense of humour, as Australian journalist Clive James said, is just common sense, dancing. A politician with a sense of humour would be an asset to democracy, but in our country they seem to be on the verge of extinction.
M Karunanidhi was a master of political quips, but when the joke was on him, his partymen couldn’t take it lightly. Kerala’s most humourous chief minister was E K Nayanar, and this quality endeared him to even his political rivals. Jawaharlal Nehru was probably the most tolerant of Prime Ministers, his ‘request’ to cartoonist Shankar to not spare him being a legend in circles discussing freedom of the press.
The US, with all its failings, celebrates political satire like no other nation does. TV shows such as Saturday Night Live (running since 1975), The Daily Show and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee (it wound up in 2022 after the merger of Warner Bros and Discovery) have been runaway hits, as was Veep, a comedy series that follows the fictional vice president Selina Meyer.
Drawing on the book ‘Political Humor Worldwide: The Cultural Context of Political Comedy, Satire and Parody, Ofer Feldman, a professor of political psychology, says political humour is a relief from the trivial stresses and frustrations that citizens, ‘the powerless’, feel toward political leaders, institutions or policies. “In this sense, such humour can be seen as a weapon of political criticism and contempt, as a method of individual coping with disliked policies, politicians and circumstances, and as an instrument to get even with oppressors,” Feldman writes in an LSE blog.
Social media has democratized political satire. On the flip side, some social media ‘activists’ do as much harm to satire itself when they try to package slapstick insults as humour. The real test of satire would be its longevity. The authorities need not try to kill a bad joke; it dies on its own, while quality satire lives on. And then, as Alexander Pope said three centuries ago, praise undeserved is satire in disguise.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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