The recent Rs 370 biryani controversy generated predictable outrage. A young man at a comedy show suggested that since he had paid for a woman's meal, he was entitled to some sexual favours in return. The audience laughed. Social media reacted with anger and criticism.
Yet what interested me was not the young man.
It was the audience. They laughed.
What made the episode even more intriguing was what happened afterwards. Once the clip found its way to social media, many of the same kinds of people who might have laughed in a crowded auditorium condemned it. The remark had not changed. The setting had.
That contrast brought back a memory from several years ago.
I was at a gathering where a group of men continued to joke about their wives. They were supposedly terrified of them. They could not spend money without permission. They could not make decisions without approval. Every comment drew laughter from the audience.
At first, I ignored it. We have all heard such jokes before. But as the evening progressed, I became increasingly uncomfortable. Every comment portrayed wives as controlling, unreasonable or domineering.
Finally, I called out. The room fell silent.
What surprised me was not the silence. It was the fact that I instantly felt I had crossed a line. Not the men who had spent the last hour making jokes about their wives. Me. I had become the awkward person in the room. The humourless feminist. The jhola-wali. The spoilsport who could not take a joke.
Later, several women came up to me and said they agreed with me completely. They, too, had found the conversation uncomfortable.
None of them had said so publicly.
Some time later, another person offered me what was meant to be friendly advice.
"If you didn't like the jokes, you need not have laughed," he said. "There was no need to object to it, embarrass yourself and spoil the mood."
I have often thought about that comment.
Nobody suggested that the men should have stopped making the jokes. Nobody suggested that repeatedly ridiculing wives had spoilt the mood. The concern was that I had drawn attention to it.
The joke was acceptable. The objection was disruptive.
Many years later, I witnessed something even more disturbing. I overheard a group of doctors discussing a woman patient. One of them casually remarked that there was nothing wrong with her and that she simply "needed to be f***ed more often."
The others laughed.
These were educated professionals discussing a patient. Yet nobody appeared uncomfortable. Nobody objected. The remark seemed to pass as just another funny comment.
What disturbed me was not only the comment itself. It was how ordinary it seemed to everyone else.
Perhaps that is why the biryani controversy struck a chord.
The audience laughed. Later, people watching the clip individually expressed outrage.
I found myself wondering whether we behave differently when we are part of a crowd.
In a room full of laughing people, it is easy to respond to the mood rather than to the words themselves. We take cues from one another. Laughter spreads quickly. Silence feels awkward. The objection feels even more awkward.
Watching the same clip alone is different. The crowd disappears. The social cues disappear. One is left with the remark itself.
Maybe that is why the reactions were so different on social media
The women who spoke to me after that gathering were not supportive of the jokes. They were not indifferent. They simply did not want to be the first people to speak.
Speaking up carries a cost. You risk being labelled humourless, overly sensitive or unable to take a joke. The strange thing is that we rarely attach similar labels to the people making the remarks.
This is not an argument against humour. Humour is one of the joys of social life. It allows us to laugh at ourselves, our frailties, our idiosyncrasies, authority and the absurdities of the world around us.
It also tells us not just about the people making the jokes, but also about the people listening to them.
That is why I keep returning to the same question. Why do we laugh?
We spend a great deal of time discussing the person who made the joke. Perhaps we should spend a little more time thinking about the audience.
After all, the joke lasts only a few seconds.
The laughter is what gives it life.
Sharada AL is the Director of Population First, a non-profit organisation focused on population and gender issues. She is the founder of Laadli, a premier advocacy initiative and media campaign designed to promote gender sensitivity in journalism and advertising. Views expressed here are the author’s own.
