The AIB Roast has managed to do things that wouldn’t have been imaginable in an ideal world. It has got people with divergent views — of the position of the line dividing humour and crassness in the name of entertainment — shift sides with every single development, says GAUTAM CHINTAMANI
A lot has been said about the famous Roast by All India Back*%d’s (AIB), a group of stand-up comics, ranging from ‘oh, wow!’ to ‘oh, please’ to ‘oh, no he/she didn’t’ to ‘oh, really’ ‘oh, yeah!’ to ‘oh, what the *%$^!!’ It has managed to do things that wouldn’t have been imaginable in an ideal world. It has got people with divergent views of the position of the line dividing humour and crassness in the name of entertainment shift sides with every single development since they uploaded a video of their Arjun Kapoor-Ranveer Singh Roast, and then took it off, then issued a statement of not intending to hurt anyone in particular, then apologised to one particular community they joked about and then being questioned by the Maharashtra Government. All these by simply trying to crack jokes that, in all honestly, don’t deserve any attention.
In case you happen to be one of the those who isn’t aware of what this particular kind of roast really is, well, it’s where a bunch of seemingly funny people take turns to lovingly hit others below the belt with trying-hard-to-be-innocuous-yet-coming-across-as-offensive-in-every-conceivable-manner comically timed barbs. The digs usually have no boundaries and include every culturally stereotypical observation and if they also happen to be sexist, racist and classist at the expense of the roastee, ideally at the same time, then the roaster and the roast is, no pun intended, well done.
This particular Roast, perhaps the first such of its kind in an Indian context, was immensely successful as far as going viral was concerned. Some were entertained, some found it trying and some simply found nothing funny and many got interested largely to find out just what the hell were people talking about. Most would have found the entire episode too childish to comment on, one way or the other, but Ashoke Pandit’s tweet took the discourse to another level. Pandit’s tweet: “Karan Johar could have easily shown his position while performing sex to his mom at home instead of making it public.#AIB Porn Show” when interpreted could suggest many things but the general consensus was that that it was offensive, crass and unwarranted. Ironically the very people who supported AIB’s right to freedom of expression mostly constituted the same category that took offence to Pandit’s statement. It’s also funny, for the want for a better word, that someone who laughed at an Ashish Shakya observation — “Parineeti Chopra is not here tonight because we told her she’d be fu%*ed by 10 dudes in front of 4,000 people. Karan Johar is here tonight because we told him he’d be fu%*ed by 10 dudes in front of 4,000 people” — could find Pandit’s remark distasteful.
As a concept Roast isn’t something new. It’s was created by the Friars Club as a mock counter to toast more than a century ago and the first official ‘Roast’ was in 1949. In the in the mid-1970s Dean Martin hosted a series of roasts on television. In fact, even the sitting US President is roasted in person annually at The White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The AIB Roast seems to be inspired by the Comedy Central version especially the ones of Pamela Anderson or Charlie Sheen where everything hinged on sexual innuendos. In fact, another of AIB’s popular gags like the Honest Indian Flights where everyone speaks exactly what’s on their mind while maintaining a smiley demeanour is reminiscent of Truth in Advertising, a 2001 comedy short.
In addition many jokes from the Roast such as Karan Johar, the Roastmaster, detecting that the last good thing that he (Ranveer Singh) was in was Deepika Padukone is as old as Woody Allen’s dialogue from his 1989 film, Crimes and Misdemeanors. Padukone might not find Johar’s joking observation as offensive as say, a leading national daily focusing on her cleavage, and while Johar means no ill, a joke about one’s self in a sexual context and one about another individual are two very different things. Remember the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry is convinced that the only reason his dentist converts to Judaism is to crack Jewish Rabbi jokes because otherwise it would have been racist. Even AIB Roast’s racist slurs were imported — someone found someone so dark that they assumed him to be tested for Ebola at birth. At the risk of sounding prude, one can surely aspire to be like the ‘West’ and rejig them with a tinge of local flair, which in this case is unimaginatively limited to mouthing ma*%$%@#$d instead of mother$%#~*r.
Considering the backlash, which is expected of us Indians, to say that as a community or a nation we don’t know how to laugh at ourselves, would be entirely wrong. One of the greatest practitioner of Sikh jokes was the inimitable Khushwant Singh, who much to Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee’s (SGPC) chagrin told them to ‘go to hell’ when they asked him to stop. Irrespective of their humour and people’s personal preferences AIB doesn’t deserve to be pitchfork’d. Surely not threatening to invoke the State machinery by lodging FIRs and such. Irrespective of the lacking legal formalities on the part of AIB, if any, such as due permissions or putting what could qualify as offensive on a public platform etc. It’s this writer’s observation that there are far more important things for the Government to be concerned with as opposed to a bunch of guys trying hard to be funny.
From a broad perspective going after AIB and the others involved is perhaps as asinine as their jokes. In all fairness AIB’s humour might be bad but it’s not killing people, and if something sounds offensive then one can ignore it. The same goes for AIB and moreover those who support their freedom of expression: if you don’t agree with Pandit’s, or Aamir Khan’s reaction (he found the entire episode violent and insulting), they can simply look the other way. From some distance, the reactions to AIB Roast and the reactions to the reactions show that everyone’s trying to outdo everyone’s stupidity. That we still have to shout to the capacity of our lungs about freedom of expression by itself is testimony enough that we aren’t focusing on the right end of the argument. This writer would rather champion freedom to not express when it comes to not liking something or finding something not up to their mark.
Iconic critic James Agee once noted that comedians usually have four grades of laugh — titter, yowl, bellylaugh and boffo. He elucidated that a titter was just a titter, the yowl a runaway titter, and noted that everyone who ever had the pleasure knew exactly was a bellylaugh was and the boffo was the one that killed. As per Agee a good gag was like the audience made to climb a ladder with these four steps and the comedian wobbling it and throwing them off the final step and then with the shortest possible time to recuperate making them climb again. AIB seems to have missed a few steps on the proverbial Agee ladder but that’s entirely up to them. What AIB has done is to set up their own unique standard of being funny and those who valour AIB’s right to freedom of expression, including the four musketeers themselves, shouldn’t cry foul when the reaction is cut from the same fabric. Yes, we Indians need to grow up in some particular aspects. At the same time we surely need to calm a few notches down. The idea of freedom of expression was imaginably best summed by George Orwell when he said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Fortunately or unfortunately this should work both ways, now shouldn’t itIJ
Chintamani is the author of the Dark Star: The loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna (HarperCollins, 2014)