The laugh language and what makes it lethal

Humour has been used in literature with good effect to not only induce laughter but to also criticise and correct for a saner political and social order. Closer home, however, humour is facing an existential crisis.

The Bombay High Court acknowledged as much last month. While responding to a plea by comedian Kunal Kamra against the amendment to the IT Rules 2021 that empowers the government to identify “fake news” about itself on social media platforms through a “fact-checking unit”, the court said the contested rules did not seem to offer protection to fair criticism of the government through parody and satire.

As the matter remains sub judice, let us look at the forms of humour and what lies in the comedian’s quiver that make the powers that be so uncomfortable.

Both satire and parody employ humour to poke fun at a target of ridicule and derision. But they are not completely identical. A satire uses humour, mainly through hyperbole and irony, to bring to the fore societal and political ills. Its deeper objective, however, is to reform by challenging behaviour, attitude and practices.

A parody is a work which mimics a familiar style, say of a person or a genre, to invoke humour. Its primary motive is to amuse by aping someone or something that the audience or the reader can easily recognise. Unlike a satire, it does not have a deeper meaning and has a much shorter shelf-life as a piece of literary art.

Burlesque is a type of writing or acting that tries to make something serious look stupid and funny. But it has served a purpose much beyond that and has been a major literary and dramatic technique for social activism and commentary for thousands of years, using humour to attract attention to serious and unresolved issues of society. In present usage, the main purpose of burlesque is generally entertainment and comedy. The word was first used in the 1500s by the Italian Francesco Berni who called his operas burleschi. More recently, the word received attention following the release of a backstage musical film by the same name starring Cher and Christina Aguilera.

A lampoon could be a light, mocking satire or a bitter scurrilous one. The origin of this word is attributed to French slang of the 17th century. It is presumed to come from lampoons (“Let us drink”), with which satirical poems and songs of that period ended. As a verb, lampoon means to ridicule or satirize. One of its synonyms with an interesting etymology is pasquinade.

In the Piazza Navona, an open public space in Rome, the remains of an ancient statue were set up way back in 1501. Once a year, the fragment would be dressed up to resemble some mythological or historical personage and members of the academia would pay their tributes by placing Latin verses on it. There lived opposite the statue a person whose name was Pasquino but his trade was identified differently by different people. For some he was a shoemaker but for others a tailor or a schoolteacher. Gradually, the statue itself got Pasquino as the nickname.

In the course of time, the style of the verses changed and clients who visited Pasquino began putting up satirical verses or epigrams biting in tone. The most popular verse was against the House of Barberini, a family of the Italian nobility, one of whose members brought down ancient monuments to build palaces and churches. The English translation of the verse read: “What the barbarians have not done, the Barberini have done”.

Since then, pasquinade has been applied to not only such poems composed in Rome but also to similar satirical compositions in other parts of Europe.