Comedy

I must have said it before but I would like to say it again that comedy is one of the most exhilarating experiences I generally have. It ranks up there with good music, sports, literature and art. I have very limited understanding of these fields but then as they say, 'to each his own'. Interestingly, only very recently I was having a very enlightening chat with a person whom I admire a lot for the breadth of his knowledge upon this very topic. 'Is there an objective goodness and merit in art and literature or indeed any human endeavor'. That's another issue though.

It all started with P.G.Wodehouse I guess. To me he is still the master and commander of all that is funny and ludicrous in the world. With his innocent almost farcical plots and queer, idiosyncratic characters he managed to weave a world that was completely devoid of malice and contempt. His was a rosy, shiny world that was forever lost in the benign vision and understanding of pre-pubescence. His stories were lost to our insistent demand of morals and social satire and to some degree, our bourgeois (I like to use this word :)) need for making sense of humanity through the creations of its champions. And then was his language. I cannot even begin to start to expatiate over the quality of his language. Just suffice to say that he was definitely one of the greatest linguist who ever took breath.

Oscar Wilde is another. He is funny to me not because he intends to be. He is funny because he seemed to have the measure of the world with such precision. He looked through the haze and glared at the world naked and ashamed in all its glorious hypocrisy, ludicrity and pretense. He was just too damn blunt and too damn right. But that's just me. I admire both his intelligence that frankly speaking most of us can never match and his guts to say things as they were. And when you are so frank and so incisive, things automatically become funny.

Then obviously the great satire of Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, John Cleese in his flying circus and Fawlty Towers, Voltaire's Candide, Gulliver's travels, satirical writings of Pope (particularly 'Rape of the lock') and Dryden and many many more. But if there is one single creation that completely tops them all, it's Catch 22. Joseph Heller created something that just makes me go numb. I was talking to a dear friend recently about the book and without even realizing I was gasping for breath after some time due to all the excitement. It's just so bloody difficult to create something that is so imaginative and so stupid at the same time. I mean, it's beyond my grasp as to how he managed to write something that has such brilliantly colorful characters with such glorious quirks in a plot that is so mindbogglingly intense. And that's not all. The story has a freaking moral. It says so much to us. Beneath the ball-bouncing stupidity, there is a huge Huge HUGE eye-opener. I can feel the goosebumps already.

We make the mistake of not taking comedy as seriously as we probably take other things. We think it doesn't deserve the respect that something like classical music has. Well, try and write something funny and you will know how hard it is. As with anything creative, a notion that is probably too alien for our disposition, it's bloody difficult. For understanding what makes people laugh, for having gone the distance of developing the linguistic apparatus necessary, and for having the intelligence and creativity to actually come up with something 'new' (how many of us in our sorry existences ever come up with anything new), the proponents of the art remain one of the most venerable artists I can indulge in.