AIB roast: India will be damned if it can't laugh at itself
The AIB's "All India Bakchod Knockout Championship" event, organised in December 2014, featuring Karan Johar, Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor has created quite a stir once the video started to do the rounds. The show, broadly following the format of the "roast" broadcast on Comedy Central, was an event in which Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor were subjected to jokes, at their expense, and intended to amuse the event’s 4,000 live audience and the millions watching the show online.
By taking pot shots at "the holier than thou" Bollywood, including demigods such as Amitabh Bachchan and new entrants such as Arjun Kapoor, Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhat, the show spared no one, not even the critics, making the film industry appear almost humane, and not that of one perched on top of an ivory tower. The theme of the show was pretty much summed by Rohan Joshi of AIB by his statement, “Why are they saying in public what we say at parties?”
The video, which was put up recently on YouTube, has in a short span managed to go viral. However, as with all things that are popular, in the true annoying Indian spirit, Maharashtra, acting on a complaint filed by Akhilesh Tiwari, who claims to be the president of Brahman Ekta Seva Sanstha, Mumbai, has initiated a probe to find out whether the content of the show was obscene and promised further action if it is found to be vulgar. Vinod Tawde, minister of culture in the Maharashtra government, has further added fuel to the fire, by ordering a probe to find out if AIB had taken out the appropriate certificates in hosting the show. Although the minister has claimed that no moral policing will take place if they were allowed by "law", only time will tell whether the "law" referred in the minister’s tweet will pertain to the obtaining of the "certificate", or also includes within its ambit, the content and the alleged vulgarity in the show.
The controversy has once again brought into question just how fragile, sensitive and emotional Indians can be. We have practically such low or dubious standards relating to morality and self-righteousness, with no room for criticism, parody or satire, that it is embarrassing and puts us to shame.
Under the law, an act or an object may be deemed obscene or vulgar if it is offensive or disgusting by accepted standards of morality and decency, and lacking sophistication or good taste. An obscene act is a criminal offence under the provisions of the Indian Penal Code with a maximum punishment of up to two years imprisonment for conviction for the first time and up to five years for subsequent convictions.
Obscenity, and the balancing of the freedom of speech and expression on one hand and the emotional distress on the other, has been a focal point in many judicial pronouncements across the world. Recently, the Delhi High Court, while rejecting a call on the banning of the movie PK, rightly remarked that seeing a film (or in the present case, a comedy show) is of the own volition and conscious choice of the spectator and those offended by the content or the theme of the film are free to avoid watching the content. The court further went on to state that satire or parody are caricatures of the society we live in, and being produced under an artists’ blunt pencil, may focus on certain aspects sought to be avoided, and further that, even if the act is nothing but concocted fiction, with the sole aim of drawing a few laughs, it does require in the interference by the state. On this point, the court observed that: “Lies made in the context of satire and imaginative expression are not really lies at all and perhaps not really even statements of fact because no reasonable listener could actually believe them to be stating actual facts.”
A similar situation came up before the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the case of Hustler magazine and Larry C Flynt versus Jerry Falwell, a case that was immortalised through the academy winning movie The People vs Larry Flynt (1996). The court, in this instance, was asked to rule on the limitations upon a state’s authority to protect its citizens from the intentional affliction of emotional distress and whether a public figure may recover damages for emotional harm caused by publication of an ad parody offensive to him, and doubtless gross and repugnant in the eyes of the most. The facts surrounding this case was that Hustler Magazine featured a parody of an advertisement featuring an alleged interview with Jerry Falwell in which he states that his “first time” was during a drunken, incestuous rendezvous with his mother in an outhouse. The Supreme Court, while holding that there was no case made out against the magazine and its editors, held that reasonable people would not have interpreted the parody to contain factual claims.
It is high time Indians receive all forms of art, especially those with the sole purpose of evoking laughter, with a pinch of salt. By introducing the roast format and raising the genre of insult comedy standards, formerly untested in India, AIB has reminded us of one essential character trait, which we seem to have entirely forgotten, that of laughing at oneself.