If the comedians’ form of humour is impossible, what are we left with?

On the face of it, the NDA government, its supporters have given much fodder to comedians. But politics since 2014 has made genuine humour impossible.

PM-KISAN scheme, india farmers, Management Information System, Direct Benefit Transfer, DBT portal, lok sabha elections — Humour, when it is deliberately crafted, relies on exaggeration, even of the darkest themes.

There are two jokes, broadly speaking, that typify the classes of political humour. The first, of course, is the emperor in his “new clothes” — that is, the ridiculousness of all power, and those that preen with it — and the little boy in the crowd smart and foolish enough to tell truth to it. The second is the man going to work who slips on a banana peel and we all laugh at his pain, his embarrassment. The first, the boy who sees the absurdity in the proud parade of patriotic sentiment and brings it out for the rest of us, is the comedian. The second, far more crass, is to laugh at the tragedy of the sad clown.