What Quentin Tarantino can teach us about the AIB Roast!
Much has now been said and done about the now unfortunately infamous and hopefully, on an underground cult level, famous AIB Knockout, the roast of Bollywood actors Arjun Kapoor and Ranveer Singh. What struck me amidst the furore is how seldom has been spoken about the art form that is a Roast itself and its implications on the social and cultural aspects that envelope us. And then, lesser has been spoken about dissecting this art form and how we choose to translate it for our own understanding. I must confess I have no authority over stand up comedy and humor. However, strictly from an audience perspective, as one of the guys who's been enjoying AIB's sketches and podcasts from the beginning more or less, here's my humble two pence on the issue.
I remember Quentin Tarantino commenting on the violence in his movies and its rather extravagant nature in an interview somewhere. He says that he expects the audience to laugh at all the violence in his movies and not actually be awestruck or disgusted by it. And, when I pondered over this, it actually started making sense. Most of this said violence is so crooked both in its premise and execution that it becomes a caricature of its own self. But what he does intelligently is juxtapose this violence amidst very serious and genuine conversation, depth of character and scenario. This shines light on the fact that, by making us laugh at this violence, he's making us ridicule it and thus see the pointlessness of it all. He silently makes us understand that violence, even in the grittiest of situations, is not the answer and that its mere mention is outrageously ridiculous.
I guess this protocol applies itself graciously to the world of stand up comedy and more so, insult comedy. Of the plethora of stand up comedians and humor artists we have in India, a decent majority have constructed their acts around ridicule. Ridicule, for these acts, works on a fairly superficial level in highlighting and taunting some aspects of our social and cultural lives that definitely deserve it. So most of these acts end up being a case of a community, involving the performers and the audiences, getting together and expressing balanced amounts of humor and outrage over aspects that are plainly, for want of a better word, ridiculous. Then, there's two other forms of humor, which have been predominantly in use - satire and subtext. Satire almost has a brotherly context with ridicule in both its content and its application and has surely found utilization by most of the aforementioned artists. The third variety of humor, Subtext, has been the main foray of two of India's leading video sketch humor channels, All India Bakchod and The Viral Fever. Subtext takes commonplace cultural happenings and projects them in partly uncanny and partly unusual scenarios thus producing humor sheerly out of nostalgic affection and mild inappropriateness. The best example for this would be TVF's famous series, "Permanent Roommates".
The reason I had to dwell elaborately on the forms of humor is to converge on the very nature of the fourth comedy kind, which is chiefly of debate and question now, Insult Comedy. I believe insult comedy takes some parts of everything earlier mentioned (ridicule, satire, subtext) and uses it in a witty way to predominantly satisfy its objective: To take a matter otherwise used in an offensive way in society and by way of satirical and ridiculous insults that mask a greater subtext, make the audiences laugh at it, and thus expose the sheer foolishness and incorrectness of that matter's existence in society. Then, on the surface, there is always the premise of insult comedy being a tool that can encourage both tolerance as well as the very rare trait of self deprecating humor. This is what Russell Peters manifests in his acts which are predominantly insulting to the audiences on the racist lines. Same is the notion with the popular roast of Pamela Anderson where the butt of many jokes is the infamous sex tape between Anderson and her former husband. Same is the notion with Quentin Tarantino and the use of violence in his movies. Same is the notion with the AIB Knock Out.
Now lets face it, through the knock out, AIB did shine the light on several issues plaguing our country and probably sparked a tiny debate or two too. The issues, in no order, include sexism, homophobia, racism, fairskin obsessions, ridiculing obesity, relationship gossip, zero size fervors, etc. And in the process, they managed to raise 40 lakhs for charity. And in more dumbfounding reality, neither is the content nor the language used in the roast event exclusive to the event itself. More or less every stand-up act or podcast revolves around the same thresholds in terms of content or language and more despicably, every 'grand masti'-ish film employs these insults, devoid of subtext, to plain commercial advantage.
So, in essence, all the outrage and the barrage of legal complications that AIB, Karan Johar, Arjun Kapoor and Ranveer Singh, amongst others face is, I believe, like in several other cases, an unfortunate consequence of being outrightly obnoxious about reading art and its subtexts. One might call it an artnoxious-ness, a syndrome that mightily plagues our mighty country. I don't even want to get into the freedom of speech argument here. Being offended by a Youtube video that has disclaimers splattered all over it is akin to trespassing a barbed fence, standing in front of a speeding train with a blaring horn, getting hit by it and then suing the engine maker for the horn being too loud. The scenario reminds me of a TEDx talk I'd recently attended, where a Professor studied the effects of violent video games on his teenage children, and ended up finding that the games taught them more of strategic planning and organizing skills than violence. I conclude by paraphrasing his closing lines, "Its not about the content of the game, its about how you choose to play it".
