Editorial: No starch in the dhoti, s’il vous plait

That’s the title of a story penned by SJ Perelman in The New Yorker magazine’s print edition dated February 12, 1955. It was inspired by an article about Pandit Nehru which said that his father Pandit Motilal Nehru, sent his laundry to Paris. Perelman had put together an imaginary correspondence between Pandit Motilal and the Parisian laundry set in the year 1903, where the customer complained about the service and the laundry proprietor was anxious to please. As it was then, politics remains an endeavour that requires its participants to grow a thick skin. But it’s not an easy pill to swallow as the Republican nominee for the American presidential race, Donald Trump learned recently.

Having exhausted his arsenal of misinformation during the pre-poll debate with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris last week, Trump blamed Haitian immigrants for stealing pets belonging to the people of Springfield, and eating them for dinner. Social media had a field day, with one enterprising South African musician David Scott, known as The Kiffness, deftly interweaving Trump’s comments with a sick-beat and releasing the parody track as a means to invoke chuckles while raising some funds for animal charities. Obviously, these are not developments that the politician takes lightly to, as the petulant Trump has urged for ABC News’ licence to be revoked, accusing the network of bias and an unfair debate setup.

It might be hard to single out Trump for not being able to take a joke, considering the vacuum that exists when it comes to plain-old ribbing in politics. Back in 1984, during the 1984 presidential debates in the US, the Republican actor-turned-statesman Ronald Reagan was asked if, at 73, he is too old to be President. Training his guns at the Democratic opponent Walter Mondale, Reagan retorted, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience. The repartee even solicited a laugh from Mondale.

Of course, the times are a changin, and so is our sense of what constitutes funny, and more than anything, who and what can be made fun of. Our inbuilt prickliness when it comes to laughing at ourselves was on full display this week when a video of a leading Coimbatore based restaurateur apologising to Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on account of a joke went viral. The crime that he was guilty of, was having raised issues related to the GST during a meeting. The incident involved the restaurateur appraising the Minister about the challenges faced by hoteliers where he highlighted that a bun doesn’t attract GST, while a cream bun attracts GST of 18%. He went on to say that customers hoping to bypass the GST were now wanting to buy bun and cream separately to make their cream buns, a harmless remark that elicited some laughs.

The episode transpired into a political slugfest with opposition leaders deeming the video as reeking of fascism. Flying into damage control mode, the BJP TN unit expressed regrets for the unintended breach of privacy. Our politicians might never really buy the argument that laughter is the best medicine. But if Ukraine, with all its troubles, is still being led by a President, who was once a comedian, there’s still hope for the rest of us grouches.