Comedy is a tricky job as many comedians cross the lines of decency and find themselves in a soup. In the light of recent developments in the #MeToo campaign, some comedians are caught up in a firestorm. Orissa POST interacts with a few city comedians to delve deeper into the subject.
BHUBANESWAR: The #MeToo movement, a campaign against sexual harassment, particularly in workplaces took the internet by storm in October, 2017 as a hashtag used on social media.
In India, the movement gained traction after Tanushree Dutta levelled allegations of sexual harassment against veteran Nana Patekar. Heads have rolled in Hollywood too starting with Harvey Weinstein.
However, the seemingly liberal progressive comedians have played out the irony on themselves as the proponents of equality and feminism are caught in the #MeToo firestorm.
Recently, the founders of All India Bakchod (AIB), an Indian comedy group, Tanmay Bhatt and Gursimran Khamba, stepped down with the latter placed on temporary leave after such allegations surfaced against them. Another comedian Varun Grover and Aditi Mittal too have been accused of harassment.
George Carlin did not shy away from joking on rapes and said, “Say you can’t joke about something because it’s not funny.” City comedians also are in a tense situation regarding the MeToo movement’s impact on comedy industry.
Rauof Gangjee, a comedian and founder of Bhubaneswar Komedians who has also faced similar such allegations of sexual harassment, opined that majority of comedians being young, they are immature and thus have a knack of getting into trouble. He agreed with all these recent accusations, the perception about comedians has definitely suffered negatively. When asked about kind of jokes permissible to set the audience into laughter, Gangjee replied, “I believe in freedom of speech. However, whenever we are greeting or having a physical contact with another person, I remain very careful not to make the other person uncomfortable.”
Roshan Bisoi, founder of Chain Jokers, said there is a fine line between offensive humour and insensitivity and harassment is an altogether different thing. “Everyone who is being called out has harassed. It’s (harassment) is not even remotely related to humour. Humour is a judgement of the profession, but this is the person who turned out to be horrible,” he pointed out. Satyabrat Mohapatra, another city-based comedian, said as a comedian running a comedy scene astray from the epicentre of the controversy Mumbai, our city hasn’t faced any repercussions yet.
Priyaranjan Sahoo said, “These things are not confined to the comedy industry only. The good thing is that women are speaking. We belong to a society where most of the times these cases are not even acknowledged. So when a woman is speaking up, she deserves to be heard at the very least.”
Arindam Ganguly, OP
