Then there is the wife whose full lips are joked about, whose family is always jeered at. The grandmother again played by a man, is a butt of jokes because she can’t stop coveting younger men and loves her booze.
These women may all be caricatures but the fact that we laugh at them as we watch Comedy Nights With Kapil must say something about us.
Even though Kapil Sharma always delivers a hurried disclaimer in the end and says, “Aurton ki izzat karein, ” (always respect women), in his skits, respect is not easily available to women or to the ‘naukar‘ (the house-help), or anyone who is too thin, too old, too strange or too poor.
But it would be unfair to target him and say, his show is an exception to the rule. Trading insults seems to be a national pass time. Watch the debates on news channels. Watch our soaps where one big showdown is scheduled every week. The reality shows cannot survive without insults and in the last Bigg Boss season, a young woman was called, fat, short and compared to garbage, another was hit and one contestant constantly abused everyone else. Salman Khan too joined the fray and talked down to most of the contestants. On Mad in India (Star Plus), while Chunky Pandey laughs hysterically, a short actor is constantly insulted and even the gifted Sunil Grover cannot save the forced humour in the proceedings.
The success of Comedy Nights With Kapil however proves one thing that good taste means different things to different people and even though The Maharashtra State Commission for Women may have had issued a show cause notice to Kapil and Colors channel in January this year, the TRPs show,nobody is getting offended.
Our patience with misogyny or milder versions of it never wears thin. So a Yo Yo Honey Singh famous for writing lyrics like, ‘Kudiyon ka laga hai buffet,’ was invited to judge the recent Miss India pageant that for years has been trying to prove how beauty contests do not objectify women. His success is not because he appeals to certain kinds of sub-cultures but because he is now ruling the mainstream music with even the likes of Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan getting on his bandwagon.
So when well-placed politicians want to hang rape victims and also women who have volition over their lives and bodies, we should not be shocked. They are symptomatic of a culture that does not look down upon sexist jokes, gender insensitive lyrics, that thinks, “boys will be boys.” And why must we take things so seriously afterall? It is all just in the spirit of fun, right? And everybody needs to laugh in these grim times. When the laughter becomes a jeer and then a catcall and then an insult, the process is very organic and the results inevitable.
We cannot and should not control creative content but at some level if we can process why we enjoy certain kind of songs, shows, visuals,the onus to change will be on us. We will at some point realise that not everything can be laughed at or consumed without question. And that if a Yo Yo Honey Singh has succeeded where better musicians and lyricists have failed, the joke is perhaps on us.
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This story was carried earlier in The New Indian Express Bangalore (http://www.newindianexpress.com/entertainment/television/Why-We-Laugh-With-Kapil-at-Things-That-Are-Not-Funny-at-All/2014/04/17/article2173249.ece3 )
Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats.
Hi Reema,
I could not agree more to this article. I do not want to corner Kapil Sharma or his production team to come up with something that is so tasteless and crude. They are just selling what sells best. They are doing their job and doing it hell good- with ofcourse no moral standing. In fact, I feel like questioning all the people who enjoy this kind of humour. Recently I was at a wedding thronged with youngsters who were not only highly-educated but also holding so-called strong morals of respect to all women. And this bunch included lots of well educated independent girls. But the kind of loyalty Kapil Sharma’s show enjoys was of utter shock to me. They knew all the right moves, characters, dialogues, jokes ! I truly agree with you Reema, the joke is on us and we just don’t get it. Its one thing to have a taste for humour, its another to not understand the underlayer of social bias and prejudices which are reiterated again and again through those jokes. I love stand up comic, for example Russel Peters- his jokes are racial et al, but I can not help but notice how beautifully he jokes on himself, that too time and time again. I wonder if Kapil can pull that off ever !?