Humour: In anticipation of April Fools’ Day, here’s an ode to silliness
It is a day that reminds us about the importance of being goofy!
Shakespeare’s fifth acts are where all the drama of the play comes to a heady or bloody end. In As You Like It, we hear a classic aphorism from the jester Touchstone, which makes an illuminating point about the silly versus smart dichotomy.
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
The contrast between the foolish and the wise, and between thinking and knowing, makes this one of those lines that launched a million April Fools’ Day columns. Welcome to another.
Right ho, Jeeves!
There seems to be an invisible thread that runs through the diverse long-lasting relationships of my life. It’s the thread of silliness, not to be confused with stupidity. I count among my people those who don’t let a PhD come in the way of a groan-inducing pun. The artists who’re not too high-minded for screwball caricatures. The people saving the world who do wicked impressions of perfectly lovely people. Then there’s another category that’s right after my heart: the confused, the awkward, the weird. They don’t even have to try to play the fool. It comes out of their very beings.
They’re what P.G.Wodehouse and Hrishikesh Mukherjee made careers of. I once had a colleague my father’s age who dutifully lost his mobile phone every two weeks; a Nokia 1100 was in his monthly budget. He’d spend hours, even days, on complex Excel sheets without saving his work. I’d often find him hunched over a desktop, nose scrunched under thick glasses, saying, “Oh no!” realising at once what had happened. He’s also the man from whom I learned one of the most valuable lessons of my life, and it has nothing to do with his field – accounting. While packing leftovers at a restaurant to give to someone in the street, make sure it’s a complete meal. Add two tandoori rotis to your butter chicken remnants, a pulao to your kaali dal, and so on. A transformative idea from one of the most thoughtful yet forgetful people I’ve ever met.
Rotflmaolol
Our digitally obsessed times throw up more silliness than can realistically be processed. We’re bombarded by videos of people doing things that make Darwin’s concept of natural selection seem a laughable hoax. I’ve spent long hours trawling the online poetry of a man who uses intoxicatingly truculent words from a rivulet of anodyne protozoa distilled into a perspicacious lacuna of peripatetic beatitude. Bizarre music videos that friends share with me deeply exacerbate my existential crisis. Scathing GIFs and hilarious memes, absurd boomerangs and surreal filters. How not to see? And then how to unsee?
It’s all an endless pageant of silliness, ostensibly performed to lighten the heavy burden of our daily lives. But there’s so much of everything out there to engage with and respond to, I’m thankful for the universal language of emoji. A see-through mask that covers all manner of emotions from incredulity to boredom. The smiling face emoji I’ve sent and received over the years spans the entire breadth of emotions from passive aggressive to resolutely ambivalent, and from genuinely amused to emphatically indifferent. It’s silly for anyone to expect otherwise.
There was only one catch…
I often wonder how people who don’t find things funny cope with things that aren’t funny. I’m not sure about medicine, but laughter is the best mechanism of the defence variety. (It is, of course, an equally useful offence mechanism.) Waves of silliness ripple through the life-sustaining ocean of humour, where sarcasm and wordplay, irony and slapstick splash about untidily. And every evening at seven, the mermaids of mirth gather to mock dreary natural metaphors like the one I’ve just used.
The lowly jester in Shakespearean drama dressed and spoke all funny. But in the end, there’s no character that elicits more pathos than the lovable fool. Like Chaplin’s tramp or Catch-22’s Yossarian, we’re all caught in the dark comedy of a world that’s forever spinning out of control. To add to the fun, the afterlife has been cancelled due to operational reasons. Let’s be silly while we can. We’ll be serious when we must.
From HT Brunch, March 24, 2019
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