“It went too soon, too soon
That age when cats fiddled
And cows jumped over the moon...”
From Tension Nahin Leneka by Bachchoo

On the strength of a few series of situation comedy for TV and the fact that I have written material for stand-up comics and parodists, I am invited to participate in a seminar on comedy at a German university. The particular department of the university has post-graduate students who learn through the medium of English and in the case of this seminar have chosen the option of what universities call “post-colonial” studies.

These departments, specialising in the literature, histories and outputs of lands such as India, have with some justification proliferated in the last few decades.
I suppose academics have determined that the world is opening up and a narrow English department which features Seamus Heaney or Ian McEwen on its literature syllabus may as well broaden its base and scope of discourse by including or even concentrating on V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and the like.
The department of the German university, which I have visited before, has a very broad cross-cultural curriculum — so one of the seminars to which I was invited was on the Mahabharat and another one was on modern non-British adaptations or renderings of The Tempest.
The students had placed and read story versions of the great Indian epic and had very many ingenuous ideas, arguments and indeed essays and presentations of its glories and meanings. I suppose the combination of epic, myth and heroic narrative exists in every culture and can and should translate though I can’t quite envisage Patna University (I choose the Indian city at random!) putting Parsifal or the Valkyrie on their curriculum.
There is of course a reason why the traffic is one way. That same Patna University will certainly study Jane Austen, Shakespeare and the English and even American canon. German or Norse myth was never part of the colonial imposition. The reverse study — Germans, Italians, French and Europeans being interested in the Mahabharat is on the one hand a continuation of the Orientalist tradition which engendered curiosity among European scholars and elites about the lands they explored and colonised. On the other, it is the effect of globalisation of which decolonisation and what jokers call the “empires striking back” are an important step.
This is where the comedy of the colonised or the immigrant comes in and I have been preparing my maps for the intellectual journey. The clichéd perception of Germans is that they are not endowed with a strong sense of humour. I am working on the assumption, without having tested it on my German acquaintance, that this is as untrue as the notion that Sardarjis are lacking in intellectual grasp. It’s a joke and all the Sikhs I know perpetrate it in the most admirable self-deprecating way. Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves for they shall inherit an inclusive sympathy and broadmindedness.
Still the doubt remains. Will British puns have to be copiously explained? The central idea in the series of seminars and exercises is that of one culture adapting to another with the narrower focus of the humour of and against the European immigrant. The students have been shown the situation comedies set in the West Indian and Asian communities of Britain, the sketch shows such as Goodness Gracious Me and Get Up, Stand Up featuring comedians of “ethnic’” origin and they are familiar with the Turkish comedians who appear on Deutsche TV and play the circuits of German cities.
Nevertheless I am prepared to be the one-legged man at the arse-kicking contest, or end up like the Irish (substitute other ethnic groups whose intelligence is the butt of jokes) grave-robber who raided a crematorium.
Surveying the history of, say, Turkish immigration to Germany or North African Arab immigration to France, one can identify some common evolutionary elements in this facet of interaction between immigrants and hosts.
There were two very distinct and even contradictory stages to the assimilation of the immigrant populations into Britain. Indians, Pakistanis and West Indians were on arrival the victims of very negative perceptions. Some of these were dedicatedly crude and racist. Some were less virulent and based on observation.
It was true to say that through the 60s, 70s and 80s very many Asians owned and ran corner shops which were open till late in the evenings. They sold confectionery, tobacco, newspapers and groceries. The comedian’s quip was then “Why don’t Asians play football? — Because every time they get a corner they set up a shop.”
There were more brutal jokes: “What do you get if you cross a West Indian with an Asian? —A car-thief who can’t drive!”
There was in equitably liberal Britain a backlash against such humour. There was an identifiable anti-stereotype school of criticism which became a badge of liberality.
The real fight-back
began when the new communities of Britain provided comic portrayals from their own experiences, culture and lives.
In the early 1980s I was commissioned to write two TV series, one about West Indians called No Problem and the other about British Indians which my director called Tandoori Nights. No Problem was well received nationally and by TV audiences but sections of the professional “race” complainants didn’t appreciate it. One A. Sivanandan, a race relations operative, called a meeting at which he banged the table and denounced our comedy series shouting “No Problem is a problem!”
The series was nevertheless recomissioned and repeated on TV. A few years later there arrived a clutch of “ethnic” comics whose jokes were tauntingly new. Take this sample from the output of a bold female Muslim Ms Mirza. After 9/11 she stands before an audience and introduces herself: “My name is Shazia Mirza and I’m a Muslim — at least that’s what it says on my pilot’s licence!”
Heard the one about the Islamist birthday party? Musical Chairs was fine, but things speeded up with Pass the Parcel!