Humour examined

The short attention span of Lahoris spotlighted.

LAHORE:

“We should really not be on this panel. I woke up this morning and saw a television show where a woman asked a cleric: who had read the nikah for Adam and Eve? She should be on this panel,” Ali Aftab Syed was speaking on Sunday at Humour as Subvertor, a session at the Lahore Literary Festival. Syed was joined on stage by Salima Hashmi, Salman Shahid and Mohammad Hanif. Moderator Jugnu Mohsin had called in sick.

The session began with Hashmi requesting Syed to sing for the audience. He gamely sang a bit of ‘Aloo Anday.’

Syed went on to explain that absurdist elements in the song had been present from the time dummy lyrics had been penned and that absurdity came naturally to him. “I think our content and music became more mature after Aloo Anday, yet those songs were not as popular.” He said Aloo Anday reflected the absurd circumstances of the nation at the time. “A sequel to that song cannot be written. We knew a little when it was written and now we know a lot more. I can now give arguments for and against military operations.”

Hashmi chimed in that maybe naiveté was a core ingredient of subversion. Syed agreed that naiveté was part of it. “We are no longer that naïve and don’t yet know the craft of how reality should be simplified,” he said self deprecatingly.

Shahid said Shoaib Hashmi had once said that he would like to write something funnier than what he read in the news. “Our society has a lot of absurdity so it is not difficult to find stories.”

Hashmi read out a newspaper article with the headline, Naked Racers in Remand. With the audience in stitches she read out the piece about six men who had made a bet for Rs20,000 to run naked in Gujrat. Two of them ran while the other four were bystanders. Eventually, the men ran by a police station, they were captured. “I cannot live anywhere else other than this country because of news like this. I have these six heroes who want to be streakers and two of them are streakers.”

Hanif spoke about last year’s festival where he had spoken about the people missing in Balochistan to a hall filled with people, some of whom had been moved to tears. He wondered why when two weeks ago the Baloch families actually walked to Lahore they had only been greeted by 40 or 50 people. He said that he had told Mama Qadeer that he would be able to get a far larger and rapt audience if he changed his name to Maulana Qadeer.

In response to a question from the audience about why a lot of humour these days was in English and not in Punjabi or Urdu, Hashmi wondered if humour in Punjabi was even more subversive. Hanif said that a friend had told him that in 30 years no one in Lahore would speak in Punjabi. He tended to agree but said that would not be the case in Sindh and said Sindhi would be spoken even a 100 years from now. “You can do master’s in Punjabi but you cannot take your matriculation exams in Punjabi.”

Published in The Express Tribune, February 24^th, 2014.