I still remember in my younger days, we used to have jokes on Sardarjis, Tamilians, Punjabis, Marwaris, Parsis and you name it, it was there. Everybody understood the sense of humor and unlike Khushwant singh said with Malice to one and all, nobody bothered to dissect and just enjoyed the joke at its face value and with malice to none.
Today, things have changed. While stand up comedy has grown, the act is increasingly difficult to design as in our broad progression we have achieved two words - Sensitivity and Sentiment. Any joke on any category of people can hurt the sentiment of people. Let alone people any joke on a dog or an animal could hurt the sentiment of NGO's specifically dealing in those.
Thus humor vehicle has increased through social media, but humor enjoyment has declined. Everyone looks for that word or language which they feel has hurt their community and goes to file an FIR and the cycle of court- bail - release etc. happens leaving humorists to be left without humor.
Now with government also pitching in to ban humor on ruling govt. politicians and govt. bodies, it is all the more difficult to create a joke on the day to day happenings, which RK Laxman so eloquently portrayed in his daily cartoon.
It is not just the ruling govt, but every govt. now a days are too sensitive to jokes and try to jail the cartoonist or humorist. Gone are the days, when a Nehru despite being lampooned in a cartoon had the good sense to talk to Shankar the cartoonist and appreciate the cartoon.
Seems as our minds broaden, our views gets narrower and wish the old times return to bring some semblance of humor in this overburdened world of scare, fear, pandemic and not look for hurt of sentiment in every piece of humor.
In this regard, while the govt says it wants to bring change and remove all hundreds of years things, it does not have the guts to remove some of the archaic laws of the britishers. One of the archaic section is Sec 295 of CPC. This has been amended to make it Sec 295 a, putting anyone criticizing the govt. in jail under sedition, hurting religious sensibilities etc. Even in parliament, they have increased the number of common words that cannot be used. This way, the whole of Hindi dictionary will be banned.
The standup comedy becomes tougher now.
