What Is So Funny?

There is a TV show called Charmed where three sisters Phoebe, Piper and Prue realise that they are witches after unearthing a big tome of magic spells of various sorts. They are periodically attacked by warlocks and all other meanies (in the form of ordinary humans), and they have to make use of their supernatural powers to defeat them and protect the innocent. Now is that supposed to be funny or what? I personally thought it was funny, but hold on. When watching an episode of this show a few years ago, I began to ponder over a question that often strikes me : 'Where does one draw the line, so to speak, between what is funny and what is not?'

There are at least two categories of people who would not find Charmed funny at all. The first are those who will point out that Charmed is simply perpetuating the 'Mediaeval' belief that there is something 'witchy' about women. Why is it three sisters and not three brothers who are being portrayed in this TV series? And to this it can replied that this is because the producers knew that they could tap into the 'collective unconscious' of their viewers who would more readily make an association between 'witchcraft' and 'feminity' than between 'witchcraft' and 'masculinity'. 'Feminity' has often been connected with the 'dark and demonaic' aspects of the human mind (which is far more gendered than we usually realise), and by casting three women as witches for the new age, the projection of women as the exotic and the repressed Other is being given a subtle legitimisation. America has a notorious reputation, it will further be pointed out, of witch-hunting (the Salem witch trials et al.), and one should therefore get rid of this cliched association once and for all. To the second category belong various kinds of people whom I shall here, for the sake of brevity, simply label as the 'scientists'. America, they shall argue, stands for the light of Civilisation, Modernity, Freedom and Progress, and we cannot allow these three witches to become role-models for our teenage girls over the country. They are taking America back into the past by three hundred years, and have also become the unofficial spokeswomen for people dabbling in wicca, vodoo, necromancy, neo-paganism, sorcery and all others sorts of unspeakable heresies against Rationality.

One could see here just a hint of the old debate between the Populists and the Elitists : the Elitists claim to be standing on high moral ground (the freedom of women and the progress of rationality in the above two examples), and the Populists reply that they can see nothing wrong in experimenting with newer forms of 'being cool'. I tend to agree with the Populists on this matter, keeping in mind the caveats of the Elitists. I would 'read' the TV series Charmed as a kind of sophisticated satire of the traditional association of women with witchcraft. That is, though this may not have been the intention of the TV producers themselves, one could argue that the viewers should see this series as 'funny' not in the sense that women are witches, but in the sense that so many people can be so easily tricked into believing that they just might be so, deep under their fair skin. In a sense, therefore, both the Elitists and the Populists are right, but not in quite the ways in which they themselves view the problem. The Elitists are right in pointing out how old stereotypes are readily propagated by the media, but they often fail to see the satirical power that the media, with a little bit of reflection, can come to possess, develop, and put to excellent use.

In short, Charmed can be viewed as a truly subversive TV series providing a critical perspective on the notion that women are more prone to witchcraft than men. Now the plot thickens, shall we say in the spirit of Charmed, when we bring in the big R word into this debate : Religion. Even with Charmed, I would not be suprised if many Christians, Muslims and Jews did not find the portrayal of three human beings playing the fool with 'evil' forces funny at all. However, when it comes to the 'retelling' or 'recontextualisation' of religious stories in the media, passions can easily run much higher. Take the case of the well-known Monty Python movie The Life of Brian. In truth, it is a satire that makes fun of certain types of believers of Christianity, and not of Jesus of Nazareth himself. It is about a man called Brian who is mistaken for the promised Messiah, and is subjected to different kinds of abuses by religious and political groups. However, the object of satire (like the 'object of desire') is always difficult to pin down so that the act of lampooning specific believers can always be 'read' as a parody of the founder of that religion.

Consider, for example, a movie called The Life of Ahmed which will be about a man called Ahmed who was contemporaneous with the Prophet Muhammad. And let us say that this film will show how Ahmed was mistaken for the Prophet himself, and was harassed in different ways by the Arabs of his time. In one sense, it is a pretty 'tame' movie (by Hollywood standards), and yet I suppose that there are very few film-directors in the 'west' today who would be so bold as to actually make and screen this movie. Not only will it raise unprecedented furore, it can easily topple series of governments in its wake. And the same would hold incidentally for a movie called The Life of Zeenat about a Muslim woman who was somehow mistaken for Lord Krishna, irrespective of where this movie is made, in India, in the UK or in the US.

And this time, let us move into the big P : Politics. Such examples are not too hard to find, but I shall mention just one from the South Asian context. I take it that nobody, as of today, would dream of writing a satire on the Partition of 1947, a tragic Exodus when millions lost their lives. And rightly so, for there really is nothing, as we say, funny about it. But consider this. In the year 2090, when more or less everyone will have forgotten (and also stopped caring) what the bloody mess was about, a dare-devil script-writer for Bollywood comes up with this spoof : the departing British want to rub in their point that without the English administration, the natives will descend into anarchy and cut one another's throats; so they instigate the Partition and have a laugh at the expense of the natives as they are moving away on their ships from Bombay to Southampton.

In short, 'what is funny' and 'what is not funny' are two categories the dividing line between which is constantly shifting. It would have been unthinkable to write a book called The Life of Brian in the Victorian England of 1871 (at most, the book would have been published anonymously), and yet today it is considered quite a mild and harmless one. I am suggesting that the same might hold for The Life of Ahmed and The Life of Zeenat in another fifty years. Moreover, a person's perception of what is funny will also depend on what one might call her Fun-Threshold (FT); this FT varies from person to person, and for the same person from one context to another. For example, if you, a non-Indian, are in the company of some Indian friends, you might listen to jokes about Indians, and enjoy a high level of FT in that situation; when, on the other hand, you are with non-Indians, you would normally maintain a low level of FT regarding such jokes unless you want to get into some sort of trouble, legal or otherwise. (And the same holds for the Irish, the Poles, the Blacks, the Italians, the Germans, and so on.)

However, note that FT is not to be confused with what is called 'sense of humour' (SH). A person could have a very low FT in one respect and a very good SH in another respect. Here is one example. A Russian Marxist will not tolerate anybody making a mockery of 'the law of historical materialism', and has in this sense a very low FT (and the same goes for an American and her 'liberalism', an Indian and her 'Shining India' motto, and an academic and her PhD thesis). In another sense, however, he could have an excellent SH, and regularly joke about some of the ills of life under Marxism (and the same holds for the American liberalist, the Indian nationalist, and the university academic).