The Sikh with a sense of humour failure?
This is also one among the 60-odd gags that the feisty 54-year-old Delhi-based Sikh lawyer has submitted to the Supreme Court, while seeking a ban on jokes involving her 20-million-strong community.
In an unprecedented plea to the top court last week, Ms Chowdhury, herself a lawyer for the past three decades, says that there are 5,000 websites which sell jokes “projecting Sikhs as unintelligent, stupid, idiot, foolish naive, inept, not well versed with English language and as symbols of stupidity and foolishness”.
These jokes, she says “violate the fundamental right to life and to live with dignity”, and so the sites carrying them should be banned.
Er…
Okay, so how, exactly will this ban be enforced? How, exactly will she manage to stop Sikhs engaging in self-deprecating humour? And, how, exactly, is a lame joke violating anyone’s fundamental right to life and dignity? Puhleese!
The puzzled judges, while agreeing to hear the rather dire plea, wondered why she sought such a ban.
“Many people we know take these jokes sportingly. It may not be an insult but only some casual comic statement for amusement. You want all such jokes to stop but Sikhs may themselves oppose it,” said the judges.
Well, quite. This is a personal crusade. I’m not convinced that Sikhs as a whole will be happy to follow.
One Sikh commentator wrote that he supported the ban because “India needs to grow up and stop being the kid at the dinner table listening wide-eyed to and laughing at crassness. It needs to stop despite the fact that we all hold free speech dear”.
Er, no. No, you don’t hold free speech dear at all.
…but Sikh joke books – many written by Sikhs themselves, and a few by India’s best-known Sikh writer Khushwant Singh – have been available for a long time.
So, good luck with that ban, then.
Most of the examples that I have read are old jokes that are probably universal and most certainly not Indian in origin.
They only work because the ‘stupid’ answer has an element of truth that counters the ‘smart’ answer. For example:
The tourist asks the idle Irish farm worker how to get to Dublin. After a bit of scratching the head he says, “If I were you I wouldn’t start from here”.
Haven’t we all been in places like that?
As they say; “Why are Irish jokes so stupid?” So the English can understand them!
Aren’t sick jokes a bit old hat? Ooops, my mistake — Sikh jokes; got any?
One of the measures of how relaxed a population feels within the greater society in which it exists is the ability to laugh at itself.
In South Africa the advent of the “van de Merwe” jokes initially provoked outrage; the Afrikaaner population should not be ‘slandered’ in such a manner. It didn’t take long for the Afrikaaner population to take van de Merwe to its collective heart and to laugh along with everyone else. Next, the Transvaalers made jokes about the Orange Free Staters who, in turn, made jokes about the Kaapies (inhabitants of the Cape Province. The Natalers made jokes about all three groups, basing their humour on the Dutch influence shown by the other three groups whilst the Natalers were “much more British based”.
This ability of the minority white population to laugh at themselves was one of the many factors which eventually brought about the fall of the Nat government and the demise of apartheid. The white population had begun to outgrow the narrow mindedness of such a regime which is why so many whites voted for the ANC.
For the Sikhs and other population groupings in India to start making jokes about each other’s stereotypes is indicative of a society wherein personal origins are of ever-diminishing importance.
The Caste system, so prevalent in India, is going to be the next target of humerous diminution.
Bloody Sikhs, coming over here, and nicking all our Paddy jokes.
Which we nicked from the Paddies ‘cos they tell them about Kerrymen – as the Yanks tell about Polacks etc.
‘Twas ever thus, and doesn’t upset those who are grown-ups or have a modicum of common sense.
Doesn’t ‘growing up’ involve being an adult and forming your own opinions on humour?