Krishna Shastri Devulapalli | Could Satire Ever Be Pro-Establishment?

Of late — not that there has ever been a lull in the last eleven years, if my social media feed is anything to go by — there has been a noticeable uptick in the jokes and memes on a certain leader from the opposition. The pro-establishment ‘funnyman’, and there are many on social media — all followers of the powers that be, either overtly or covertly — creating ‘hilarious’ memes, cartoons, and reels is a curiosity and makes for an interesting character study.

In essence, this guy gets his ‘laughs’ from mocking the underdog, the downtrodden, the little guy who has the temerity to raise his voice against The Order. (That this opposition leader isn’t exactly your textbook ‘little guy’ may be true, but that he’s definitely not the ‘Big Guy’ today and hasn’t ever been in the past is incontrovertible.)

This kind of satirist is successful. Sometimes his following outnumbers those of the conventional satirist. He is followed by powerful people — quite often, the most powerful people in the country, in fact. After all, they constitute The Order.

When you attempt comedy or satire, it’s all about two things:

Who the target of your mockery is.

How strongly rooted in truth the cartoon, article, or stand-up routine is.

For a satirist, the target is always the Establishment. The satirist’s raison d’être is fighting the Establishment.

So, who then is the comedian fighting for the Establishment?

Why not refer to our glorious past — real or otherwise — that infallible ready reckoner for everything today. Can you imagine our homegrown satirists Tenali Rama, Birbal, or Gopal Bhand siding with the king? These characters existed for the sole purpose of making the megalomaniacal king see the error of his ways. How terribly unfunny our folklore would be if our jesters mocked the peasant — or even the breakaway rebel leader hiding in the forest — and propped up the king.

The comedian fighting for the Establishment, let’s see, is like the guy who lovingly fashions artificial claws and then proceeds to present them to a pack of hyenas hunting a lone deer.

Coming to Requirement Number 2 — Truth — the Establishment (whoever they may be) is, first and last, its primary subverter. Truth, you see, is ugly. It is a powerful solvent that can dilute the bum-glue so essential to clinging on to shaky thrones.

This doesn’t mean, conversely, that what isn’t the Establishment is faithfully wedded to the truth. It just means that the Establishment, especially the kind we see today all over the world, has much more — infinitely more — to lose than everyone else put together were Truth excavated.

For the satirist, Truth is all he has. That’s his raw material, his paint, his ink. And his skill lies in diddling it out of uncomfortable, hard-to-reach spaces — spaces controlled by power — and making a cartoon, limerick, poster, or film with it. So, to be a satirist, you can be on no side but the opposite.

Does that mean, then, that one can’t send up the opposition — the second-rung guys who are dying to become the Establishment? Of course not. It just means that you cannot be seen as shooting the gun from the Establishment’s shoulder.

How does the pro-establishment satirist get his laughs, then? Or his popularity?

Well, the pro-establishment ‘humourist’ gets his ‘laughs’ from the heckler or bully. The heckler doesn’t laugh from his belly, spontaneously, his mirth bursting out as a response to the truth in the joke. His laughter doesn’t come out of empathy. The heckler’s laugh, nay, sneer, comes from the opposite place. He is the same guy who’ll find a video of a firecracker tied to a stray pup’s tail funny.

Have you noticed how his thigh-slapping, demented, off-key cackle is always part of a chorus? It is never a brave, hearty, honest, individual laugh. That is because the heckler or bully has neither the self-esteem nor the individuality to function alone.

Heckler-bullies love groups. They operate in gangs. Heckler-bullies can’t take a joke on themselves. Their response to debate is violence. Their response to dissent is also violence. Above all, their response to mockery is violence. Remember what Duryodhana did when Draupadi laughed at him?

They love pecking orders. They are anti–anti-establishment. Therein lies the ‘popularity’ of the pro-establishment humourist.

Pro-establishment humour, therefore, is not humour. It is propaganda. A pro-establishment artist is not an artist. He is a painter of hoardings, a maker of cut-outs.

Pro-establishment art is a signed confession that the artist’s muse is dead and its corpse is rotting in his basement.

Pro-establishment art is an open admission of fear — fear of irrelevance, fear of being excluded.

Pro-establishment art does the opposite of what art ought to do. It comforts the bully and disturbs the oppressed.

Pro-establishment art is temporarily profitable, gives the artist a sense of belonging, and makes him feel safe — till the Establishment realizes, as it always does, that he, too, doesn’t make the cut for some reason, and comes in search of his compromised, obsequious, and, above all, unfunny cojones.