In these contentious times when people getting offended is no big news at all as it seems to happen every day, the only way to introspect as a society, and as a world together, may be through comedy —whether it is black humour, satire, alternative humour or improvisational comedy.
The latest trend seems to be shaping up fast in sarcastic Facebook events posted by various popular pages. For those who can’t understand the humour, they must be warned that these are not real events, but imaginary ones dressed up and posted to mock the very idea that they promote.
Recently, a popular Facebook meme page called Tamil Dank Memes posted an event, “To Stalk Girls Wearing Saree —Organized By Chennai Pasanga Da”, to mock the posts by people who considered traditional Kurti and Salwar as the most proper dress for girls and who even proposed a dress code for modesty.
The event, posted last week, received positive and humorous reactions from many page visitors.
“Comedy has the ability to show the harshest of truths without creating any huge backlash in the room, and even if there is any animosity, it would usually be from people who don’t appreciate good humour or, more importantly, the harsh realities of the society that we live in. I found this post funny and right to the point, with all the prevalent sexism”, says Jobin John, a social media user.
The latest ones following this trend of sarcasm are Dank Memes Malayalam and Memestan highlighting moral policing in general. With Valentine’s Day coming up in a few weeks, these pages have posted two such events — ‘Anti Valentine’s Day March’ in Kochi and ‘Bajrang Dal Morcha against Valentine’s Day’ in Delhi. The former has 600 people interested, while 13,000 are interested in the latter event.
“Our followers are a fairly progressive bunch of people despite their political views. So we already know that our sarcasm won’t fail to hit the right spot for the target audience,” says an admin of Dank Memes Malayalam page regarding such posts.
But people seem to not understand sarcasm every time, “Although, we made justice for Janapriyan, the event kind of got out of hand because some minnow news websites took it seriously and eventually we had to take it down,” he adds.
“I feel that the whole idea of moral policing just reflects the incapability of someone to be in the position of those considered “morally not right”, because when a chance is given, the real intention will come out. I am not sure about how effective the sarcastic posts are, but they definitely point us to the general consensus of the public. Humour is useful, but we are addressing a serious issue here,” says Ashwini Sudhakaran, when asked about such posts.
With ignorance and intolerance becoming more and more visible, improvisation seems to be the only way for people to express their opinion.
