Colouring humour in shades of grey

It was a full house at a performance venue in Adyar on Sunday evening, with the audience eager to get themselves a taste of dark humour from Chennai’s standup artistes. Eight of the city-based group, Evam’s, comics, including Vikash Paul, Aaquib Jaleel, Barath Balaji, CK Sarvesh, Rahul Sridhar, Abiishiek V, Rohini R and Sharat Subramanian were set to present their versions of dark and offensive humour.

How to distinguish dark jokes from other humour? They are the kind that touch upon subjects that are considered taboo or generally serious to talk about, publicly. “We wanted to name the show ‘Dark and Offensive Jokes’ so that it is not ambiguous and everyone coming to watch it knows what they’re up for,” said the show’s host Vikash Paul, introducing the concept to the eager-to-be-amused audience. Warming them up with some ‘jokes’ on race, one of the comics presented his way to identify a South Indian among a large group of people by their skin colour.

Disclaimers were carried out by the performers throughout the 90-minute-long show that they deemed themselves to be successful in their acts if the viewers felt uncomfortable. But what was more uncomfortable was a huge lack of original jokes throughout the length of the show. What was presented in the name of dark humour, unfortunately, remained the cliched and dangerous generalisations that women are ‘bad’ drivers, Muslims are ‘linked’ to terror and that babies are ‘stupid’.

The subjects for humour did not go beyond sex, babies, food served at funerals and some hackneyed everyday observations. Lines on people being fat or gay or disabled could not have been more uninspired. Particularly at a time when the country is voting to elect its next government, it was surprising that the comics steered clear of any political humour at all, which would have helped the performers make a genuine attempt at being offensive in their comedy. With their presentation of overdone humour, the show fell short on delivering what dark humour stands for — discussing topics that were challenging and a taboo.

“Even though the show was meant to be in English, as publicised, most of the comics casually delivered some of their jokes in Tamil. It should have said Tanglish (Tamil and English) if the humour was going to be delivered in Tamil as well, so those who do not know the local language would not be caught unaware,” one of the audiencemembers tells us.