The virtues of reading comedy

(A gentle reminder before you start reading - nothing in this section should be taken seriously)

After a lot of deliberation I have come to the conclusion that the form most conducive to comedy is the written form. It is always better to read something funny than decode, in real-time, the atrocious Punjabi accents of stand-up comics yelling and spitting on a microphone. You would expect someone like me to say this because I have a humour blog. But what I also have is an abysmally low number of readers. If this post is self-promotion then every politician in orange robes is a saint. Promotion without an audience and saints without morals are equally paradoxical. 

There are many reasons why I consider reading the best way to enjoy comedy. The first one has to do with privacy. There is no one between the page and yourself. If a joke turns you on, you can do something about it in the privacy of your home. You can argue that the same can be said about comedy videos. But in videos, you can hear the audience's response and it changes everything. The sound of laughter can bring down institutions that have been erect for centuries, let alone the ones that are momentary and prone to self-deflation. Since you can hear the audience’s response, there is also the risk of not getting a joke and feeling bad about yourself because others got it. But more horrifyingly, you run the risk of laughing at something no one else found funny and realising how terrible a person you are. 

There is also the physical response of your body to consider when you find a joke extremely funny. A suppressed fart detonated by a joke in public can be disastrous. It’s no better if you are watching a video in the privacy of your home. You can still hear the laughter of the audience and your tendency to make everything about yourself will make you feel embarrassed, regardless of where you put farts on the funny scale. You can say all of this can also happen with reading comedy in a public place. To that I’ll say that you’re being a nitpicker and we should move on to the next point. 

The next reason why reading is the best way to consume comedy is meant for people who feel inadequate in apparently well-read social circles because instead of getting lost in the juvenile world of Harry Potter, they were slogging for their exams in school, good marks being the only way to get their asses out of a shitty small town. The ones who respond to adults saying ‘I am a Potterhead’ with ‘We all have our heads filled with shitty thoughts. You don’t have to call yourself a Pottyhead for that. Oh you’re asking if I am one. Good joke, good joke haha. Well I guess, in a way, we all are indeed Pottyheads haha. You meant POTTERHEAD? I'm sorry, what's that? Aah the Harry Potter movies!’. The ones who then get subjected to a tirade of unoriginal arguments explaining why the books are so much better than the movies. A tirade that ends only at the interruption of another pottyhead uttering nonsense like Azkaban or Hogwarts.  

Image by Prajakta Ostwal

Reading comedy can help you give it back to them in their own language. You too can drop names like Jeeves, Wooster, Blandings and so on. You can utter your own nonsense like ‘The weather is rather rummy, Jeeves’, respond with a bit of baritone in your voice, ‘I suppose it is, sir’, and break into a hysterical laughing fit. All this if you get into the world of PG Wodehouse. If you despise the blatant display of British privilege, you can cross the Atlantic and get familiar with the works of James Thurber, Simon Rich, Fran Lebowitz, Calvin Trillin and so on. If you despise foreigners in general, you can come back to Indian authors like PL Deshpande, Harishankar Parsai, G Sampath and so on. Take these names and the pottyheads will run away with their tails tucked between their legs, bawling like a baby, and calling you as evil as the poor noseless chap they don’t accord the decency of being called by his very own name. 

What if you are not the reading type? If you were the reading type, chances are that you would have read the Potter books under peer pressure anyway. Well, don’t you worry. Comedy comes in small portions. You don’t have to read all of it because nobody (not even the writers) gives a damn about the plot. A dead person might as well be pretending to be dead the whole time simply because he found it sexy. In my experience, one page of Wodehouse can easily last five social gatherings. There is no name we can give to this cult, unfortunately. Wodehouse-head is too long and PG-head is just an ‘i’ away from pig-head.

The last but the most important reason why reading is the best way to consume comedy is that there is very little scope of miscommunication. Thanks to the written medium, a distinction can be drawn between ‘rappers’ and ‘wrappers’. It’s an important distinction because while ‘wrappers’ conceal substances, ‘rappers’ consume them. There’s no way anyone can pronounce the extra ‘w’ without sounding wrong (there’s no such thing as ‘rong’, in case you’re wondering. There is a tribe in Sikkim called Rongs but it’s not like people bring up Sikkim in everyday small talk like ‘the traffic in Sikkim is really the worst’ or ‘the street food in Sikkim is overrated’ and so on). 

The written medium also neutralises the horrible effects of mispronunciation. Someone from the dry and famous western state, that’s been called model and what-not, can mispronounce the word ‘wrappers’ as ‘rapers’. Thankfully as proof there is always the written word to resolve any doubt if something like this is said out loud - if you want to eat chocolates, you’ll have to deal with the wrappers first. 

I am not being a snob here - judging people’s accents, reading choices, fantasies, and their choice of the form of comedy. But if I sound like one, let me fix it by leaving you with an image of myself that your stereotyping brain will never be able to associate with snobbery. I come from the eastern part of the great state of Uttar Pradesh. I don’t live there anymore but I do get an uncontrollable urge to wear a dhoti and a banyaan sometimes; go out in an open field with a lota in my hand, chewing a neem twig; and, with the confidence only an animal can muster in its natural habitat, say to whoever’s passing by - ‘Ram Ram bhaiyya, ka haal chaal. Bhauji kaisan baahin?’.

Image by Prajakta Ostwal