/ 0
The art of comedy has gone viral on television and social media. Lol (laugh out loud) is the mood. Cynically speaking, there is something seriously wrong with a society that is completely addicted to finding reasons to laugh out loud all the time. But maybe that is digging too deep and is not in the scope of this article. What is agonizingly irritating though is that comedy is being sprinkled with obscene, derogatory and cheap views of women. Seriously, how sexhungry must a society be to share such jokes and laugh about them publicly? Shameless, but we don’t even find it objectionable anymore!
We grew up on jokes about Humjayega (a comic relief figure among Nepali speaking population in India) playing pranks on girls, Humjayega ridiculing or fooling a ‘nakali keti’ (girl unduly devoted to style, appearance, clothes), etc. That was when the majority of our hill people were illiterate and semi-educated. Now, even after attaining a much higher level of education and, hopefully, intellectual fulfilment, things still haven’t improved. Our standup comedians, both nationally and locally, load us with jokes that often borderline on the objectification of women and obscenity. Sometimes their jokes are open profanity packaged in a sense of humour. A lot of our contemporary Nepali speaking comedians in Nepal, Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Sikkim like to target women’s dress, their cosmetics, gait, body language and so on.
I grant that there is a genre of comedy that is all about sexualizing femininity. But that is understandably (an ill-conceived) art for private (mis)entertainment - sorry for sounding too preachy here. The degree of public acceptance of such jokes expresses the level of decline in public decency and civility. In other words, the quality of the sense of humour and witticism are a reflection of the intellectual evolution of any society. That explains why we do not have a lot of highly intellectual jokes in our vernaculars. Wit is one of the rarest elements in our literature.
Jiwan Rai
To read the further article please get your copy of Eastern Panorama August issue @http://www.magzter.com/IN/Hill-Publications/Eastern-Panorama/News/ or mail to contact @easternpanorama.in
