Covid-19: No laughing matter

 

“A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.” – George Eliot

“I started a joke which started the whole world crying.” – Bee Gees

Of all people, professional comedians should be the first people to empathise with Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin when his attempt to crack a joke, with his folkloric "abah" (father) wielding the rotan (cane), fell flat.

They must have experienced nights when they threw out a zinger of a punchline at the dim dark faces and were greeted by silence, at best a couple of polite chuckles from friends in the audience trying to diminish the sudden leaden chill in the atmosphere. Thick skin layered from experience allows them to blunder on imperviously in swift search of recovery.

Instead, some of them have posted videos on caning and double standards. Comic inspiration, instead of empathy or sympathy. Irredeemably irreverent and iconoclastic.

In my first 16 years in theatre, I directed plays that dealt with serious themes – sexual ambiguity and a gay relationship, superstition and modernity in Africa, the abuse of women in India, slum-dwellers in South Africa, Kobo Abe’s surreal play of a family invading and taking over a man and his apartment (echoes of Bong Joon-Ho’s recent Parasite), et cetera.

During that period, I was asked why I didn’t do comedy, and my flippant half-true answer: comedy terrified me. With a serious play, you can take silence as absorption in the performance. With comedy, silence means you shrivel, haemorrhage and bleed to death inside.

Heck, I remember (I wish I didn’t) my first attempt at a stand-up routine in the ballroom of a five-star hotel, the annual dinner of a professional association, half of the several hundred people well into raucous “Yaaaaamseeeengs" during the course of the dinner. 

I was slotted after a school drum band, and before the main act – four male dancers and four female dancers in someone’s vague idea of Spanish costumes via Chinatown. The experience was so traumatic, four slugs of neat double-shots of brandy in the lobby lounge couldn’t deliver the balm of mind-melt amnesia I sought.

Except, of course, Muhyiddin’s attempt at levity wasn’t greeted with silence (which he would have preferred) but stirred up a hornet’s nest on social media.

Sir, take it from a battle-scarred veteran - in comedy, it’s about timing.

People are irate over political leaders being the bearer of the virus. We have had assertions that people should not single out politicians for blame, because citizens are also passing it around. Heard of leading by example?

Sir, you may be leading by example by working from home and undergoing regular swabbing, but your colleagues have been gallivanting all over the place.

Religious Minister Zulkifli Mohamad Al-Bakri alone is responsible for the sequestering of you, seven ministers, six deputy ministers and the Health Ministry director-general after a Covid-19 meeting. Not to mention the disruption in services with the necessary closure of various facilities for fumigation and cleansing.

No double standard in enforcement. The age-old slow-grinding wheels of justice will be speeded up with police authorised to issue compounds on the spot.

Again, a failure of timing. You shouldn’t talk about the absence of a double standard in laying down the law, of how swift justice can be meted out when there is still the matter of Plantation Industries and Commodities Minister Khairuddin Aman Razali's possible breach of his quarantine after returning from Turkey in July.

Heck, the case has even driven former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak to distraction and pleading for its conclusion because DAP stalwart Lim Kit Siang keeps harping on it.

The last I know, Bukit Aman is still probing.

The police are privy to things we do not know (so what’s new, there are many things in this country the people are not privy to and only find out about it after, if ever), but how difficult is the task? He came back on this day, then he went here, he was there, he met so-and-so. What was the standard operating procedure (SOP) then? Did he violate it? What else to probe?

Surely it’s not as difficult as piecing together the messy pieces of a body blown up by explosives in the belukar (bush), with VIPs implicated, or tracing the spawner of stale semen, or trying to find a missing daughter or a low-down shyster who inveigled himself into the good books of IMDB and turned them into bad books?

The case not closed on the two missing persons I can understand. Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack. With a population of 7.8 billion in the world, looking for two missing persons must be looking for two needles in 1,000 acres of haystacks.

Meanwhile, for all the assurances that the virus is being contained, the daily toll of new cases is in the hundreds (an all-time high of 3,351 active cases as of writing). The slowly growing number of red zones on the map of the country are giving it the look of a measly skin disease, with small red spots of infection blossoming in schools, universities, malls, government offices, corporate headquarters, buses and bus terminals, places of worship and residential areas.

Not a lot of laughs.

Oscar Wilde was jailed for his sexual inclinations, so it is understandable if you are dismissive of any advice from him, but I concur with his opinion of the proper role for a father: “Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.” 

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THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist. - Mkini

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.