I can’t laugh anymore

Some days I just can’t bring myself to be funny. To be fair, according to the emails that inundate my inbox every week like so much oil in the Gulf, I am never funny. Maybe it’s true. Maybe, I am that guy in your office who thinks he is the resident wit but is actually just plain annoying. Unfortunately, I still think I’m hilarious and that means you will have to tolerate me a little longer. That is until someone in human resources finds out about my using the office computer to download porn.

Regardless, finding the funny can be difficult some days. It can be nigh impossible even. Those are the days when the regular shenanigans of the professional buffoons in political office can’t distract me from the tragedy that is Pakistan today. I can only laugh so much, until the tears start becoming real. I wish, for example, that I could make up some jokes about Hillary Clinton’s recent visit. Perhaps something about how her latest charitable donation of $500 million is much appreciated even if it is written on a cheque made directly out to the president. Or, maybe, I could work up a bit about how the recent talks between Pakistan and India’s foreign ministers were about as likely to succeed as… well… talks between Pakistan and India. It’s bad when the best metaphor for time wastage you can come up with is the actual activity responsible for wasting time in the first place. I could even have made this a column about how we all apparently spend too much time Googling sex acts with farm animals. I had a wonderfully hilarious – I thought so – column thought up about how, maybe, people aren’t trying to decide the best way of responding to the amorous advances of their livestock but were instead simply trying to learn more about the distinguishing features that define gender. Get it? Goat Sex as in: What is the Sex of the Goat? Ha. Ha. I slay me.

But I can’t write those columns. Not today. Maybe next week, although given how things just get worse week after week, day after day, maybe not even then. I can’t bring the funny, so to speak, because I am too full of anger. Too full of hate. I am brimming with rage. How can I not be? How can you not be? How can I do anything but pound the walls with my fists because all day long I’ve been trying not to think about the final moments of a four-year-old girl who was raped and strangled because she wanted to go buy some chips in the middle of a sunny day. Or about the nurse who tried so desperately to stem the sexual advances of a repugnant creature given authority and power over her by whatever vile political party he was associated with. I’ve been trying not to think of how the only way she could save herself was by nearly killing herself.

There is the milkman who was shot dead in Karachi because he didn’t want to involve himself in politics. I try to stop thinking of his four children coming to terms with the absence in their lives brought about because he simply wanted to run a business. I cannot think about the murder of two Christian brothers shot dead after being framed for committing blasphemy. I cannot think about it because I can only rage at the self-indulgent stupidity that would make anyone believe that blasphemy is still being done in Pakistan. These are just some of the stories that make me bite down on my own arm to keep from screaming. There are so many more like them. Every day we find new ways of creating horror.

So there can be no jokes from me today. No comedy. Because I can’t laugh with a mouth full of blood.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 22^nd, 2010.