When a joke boomerangs

Nothing is more exasperating than the death of a fine joke. My wife has slaughtered many of my good ones with her impromptu interruptions. Whenever I am at the point of delivering the punch line before a captive audience in my drawing room, she makes her proud entrance holding a tray and declares triumphantly, ‘I’ve tried a new recipe of baked spinach pakoras! I hope you will like it.’ And the subtle climax of my joke is lost in the hullabaloo of exclamations about her culinary skills.

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Equally awkward is the predicament when a joke is missed by the targeted audience. Once, a review of Dev Anand’s movie Tere Mere Sapne appeared in Filmfare. The movie was based on the celebrated novel The Citadel by AJ Cronin. But this fact was not mentioned in the film’s credits. So, the reviewer, with his tongue firmly in cheek, commented that Cronin seemed to have plagiarised the plot of his novel from that film. Soon, the magazine’s mailbox was flooded with letters from irate Cronin fans, each one pitying the acumen of the reviewer and reminding him that the novel was published at least three decades before the movie. The editor dutifully published most of the letters but added a footnote: Our sympathy lies with our reviewer whose harmless lampoon went over the heads of the readers.

But some missed jokes can also boomerang on the jokester. A year ago, an attempt at humour by a 62-year-old man in Madurai landed him in trouble. He had gone on a sightseeing tour to Sirumalai hills with his daughter and son-in-law. He uploaded photographs of the visit on Facebook with the caption, ‘Trip to Sirumalai for shooting practice’. This innocuous joke was lost on the Vadipatti police who filed a case and even arrested him on various charges, including ‘waging a war’. While the Magistrate granted him bail, he moved the Madras High Court against the charges. While quashing the FIR, the high court commented that any normal or reasonable person coming across the post would have simply laughed it off. It also made an observation that had any of the noted humourists authored this judgment, he would have proposed a momentous amendment to the Constitution by adding ‘duty to laugh’ and ‘right to be funny’ to the existing provisions.

It’s the finest moment for humour when banter is responded to with a sharper banter. Once I visited a sweetmeat shop with some friends. One of them remarked while tasting a barfi, ‘Quite tasty, but looks a bit stale. For how many months has it been lying here?’ The rustic-looking halwai replied without any hint of a smile, ‘Can’t say, sir. Our ancestors prepared this barfi. None of them is alive now.’