Melbourne laughter challenge

Stand-up comedy is just about making inroads into our evenings. The first-time performance of the world famous Melbourne Comedy Roadshow, in the Capital, Bangalore and Mumbai this Diwali was quite a rollercoaster, though one wishes that it was organised for a bigger audience. MEENAKSHI RAO brings you a report on one pile-up of laughter in a very Aussie way

He is Irish, he says, peering out of his handsomely flowing silver locks. Oh, the land where all those stupid couples wait up whole night for their sexual relations to arrive, you are tempted to ask Dave Callan as he launches on to the nutcases he has met in India. Then there is Matt Okine from Ghana — a country in west Africa where clothing is optional and breast-feeding a public event, not to mention the fact that most non-Africans apparently need geography lessons in spotting this nation 15 or so countries away from the more visited Kenya.

There are others too, like Alan David who looks amazingly like Alan fromHangover (Zach Galifianakis) you fell in love with some years back. He pays a tribute to his dead father by doing a rigorous shove and push act, jutting his butt and crotch virtually into the front row of embarrassed ladies laughing out nervously at the sheer audacity of it all — an act which was a brazen exaggeration of a certain body movement that helps in making babies in saner surroundings, like a bedroom perhaps?

There is also this last man standing Harley Breen who has won some big comedy award some time back. He stands his act rather erectly, one must say, on the penile fingering sessions he says he was asked to give his wife for four months, just so that she could make natural childbirth a little easier for herself!

Take all this together, throw in a lot of F-words, a dash of irreverence which so signifies anything comic nowadays, an over-indulgence in talking about private body parts and a whole lot about rumbling, tumbling, fumbling India — and here you go — depending on how sporting

you can get about the eccentricities of your nation being made fun of, there is indeed a laughter session in the offing.

For, the seven-member Melbourne Comedy Road Festival is here for the first time in any years, and it prides itself on being a top of the world entertainment company married to the job of creating a laughter community as strong as its rather personal brand of jokes which revels in being insanely below the belt, inside the pants, into the vaginas most of the time and if you are incensed at such unprintables being brought to your notice, then maybe you should be spared the outrage of being told that either you are d**khe**d, or a motherf****r or both put together for the time you are giving them this Diwali.

But let’s get over with this light-hearted repartee, just a natural reaction to those desi fast ones being thrown at you with abandon. Fact is that in India, this delightfully raucous lot has already floored audiences in Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai and now Delhi, where a pre-Diwali two-day nightshow had a controlled crowd of mostly ex-pats enjoying a laugh at the expense of Beyonce, Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan, Stephen Hawking and, of course, the aam aadmi of India.

As the Irishman from Australia tells you how amazing Indian food is, there is a fart that follows on the mic. When he tells you how amazing the Taj Mahal is, he also laments the fact that this bloke Shah Jahan spoilt it all for the entire male species by building such an unmatched monument of love that no man can ever match up to.

One must say though that the ones on India — which one guesses are an essential part of the package for any roadshow coming in from abroad (you got to know the country you are visiting or at least show that you know) are a mix of the usual suspects — like how amazing Diwali is (firecrackers being burst in the middle of the road), how amazing the Indian traffic is (unending, time-taking, dangerous and thriving on the dictum that ‘lane driving is not at all safe driving’!) and how amazing the population count is (in Australia it is one square kilometres per man, as opposed to here where it is 10,000 per kilometre).

The Irish guy asks you if anywhere in the world has anyone seen five people on a mobike going on a highway? He saw it in India. As did his colleague who was amazed at the fact that at the Mumbai airport immigration line, there were “10 people between me and the next guy in the queue”. Well, population explosions have their own little way of showing up in full force out here, mate! A fact, the lady in his team found out in a rather funny way: Well, there were seven moustached men who guided her through a shop where she had gone to buy a saree. Coming from a land like New Zealand where you feel lucky to have met a human in, say, a 20 km stretch, and where you have to do the garbage, the house, the cleaning, the washing, the shopping, and even sex sometimes all on your own, such occasions of being waited upon by so many people are, indeed, novel enough to find a tickling mention in a comic presentation.

So you see, the Melbourne fest, part of a comedy presenter exchange programme if I am correct, is a welcome step in the right direction. We, as a population, have lost our humour somewhere under the loads of stress we invite on us for reasons unknown to humanity. Also, the genre of stand-up comedy is just about making its presence felt in urban India with Vir Das and Co leading the desi brigade into catching up with their laughter sessions.

The Melbourne Roadshow will only make this fledgling movement a force to reckon with — by and by yes, but nevertheless. Yes, their humour was cocky, arrogant, disrespectful and the rest of it all — but if have successfully dealt with the Aussie sledging on the field, this is just one gentle, but hilarious, chapter in taking the Aussies as they come.

Source: Published in The Sunday Pioneer, November 18, 2007