Dastardly, inhuman, numbing: the Charlie Hebdo killings have torn through our lives, reducing freedom of speech itself to a cartoon. Humour is always subversive, in Umberto Eco’s The Name Of The Rose, Benedictine monks reading books that taught them to laugh at orthodoxy, were killed. If you want to tell people the truth, said Oscar Wilde, make them laugh else they will kill you.
In desi popular culture humour’s divided broadly into two genres: the slapstick and the gently playful. The slapstick genre was represented by comedians like Rajindranath, Mehmood, Johnny Walker who fell about, walked into doors, slipped on banana peels in the Groucho Marx style. The gently playful genre was represented by the Amol Palekar, Hrishikesh Mukherjee style who Read More
