Watching the video of Michelle Wolf’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner put me in a very good mood. I loved lots of things about it. I loved Wolf’s faux-inept delivery, her stuttering and stumbling and then how, with each stumble, she managed to kick up the mud directly onto the faces of the people ruling America. I loved it that she pulled no punches, took no prisoners; the President’s spokeswoman was called out for being the liar that she is; the hypocrisy of legislators voting against abortion rights while getting terminations for their mistresses was laid out; Donald Trump’s misogyny, racism, egomania and mental instability were pared apart, including lancing him with the insults that would hurt him most – that he was not as rich as he claims and probably terrible in bed. I appreciated the fact that through the levity and delectable nastiness Wolf managed to touch upon most of the major issues Americans face today.
Watching the audience
For me, what took this drive-by blast of humour to another level was that the Democrats and liberal media also copped some damage. Best of all, I relished the cut-away shots of the audience, the suited-booted, diamonded and designer-dressed power elite of America not knowing where to look, the men choking on their wine, the women suffocating their laughter, hands clamped on mouths, in a sea of stony faces one lone man convulsing with mirth, another man telling his female companion not to laugh. I was hungry to see more and I hope one day there will be a version of the 18-odd minutes which shows just the audience and the different ways in which they reacted to Wolf’s relentless sallies. Yes, Wolf’s gig put me in a very good mood for about five minutes after I finished watching it.
After that though, the serious stuff came knocking, asking to be let back in. America is at a dire point in its history. The societal meltdown in that country affects all of us, it contributes significantly to the dangerous crises the whole planet is facing. What Wolf was sending out was actually a cry of horror. And then came another obvious realisation. We in this Republic are also facing one of the worst moments of our much shorter history. If this country disintegrates, then those who come after us will point to this nodal point and say, “Yes, May 2014 onwards… the final straw that broke the camel’s back.” If the Republic survives in any recognisable form, then the generations to come will shudder and acknowledge that those of us living today were both responsible for this dark passage of societal collapse and the ones who had to suffer through it. Whatever happens, we Indians do not have the same ability and facilities to project our cries of horror across the world.
In that sense, watching Michelle Wolf lay it out like it is before the core of the American establishment, taking away from those fancy-suited, haute-coutured men and women the possibility of any kind of denial, the possibility of any claim to ignorance, watching her render them naked before the world, was akin to watching the Olympic team of a powerful sporting nation sweep up all the gold medals we from this country can never hope to win. Or, to give a slightly more weighty analogy, like watching even the frayed emergency health services of a developed nation providing the kind of care we are far from being able to deliver.
A person and a society do not live by simple biology alone. Somewhat differently from what is happening in America, we too are undergoing a multiple-organ failure of our moral, intellectual and spiritual sectors. The diseases of over-obedience, of hypocritical compliance, of giving in to the fear of the powerful, of caving in before majoritarian lunacies, of grotesque greed are ripping through our country and require serious medication and radical change of lifestyle. The laughter and satire someone like Wolf bravely provides to her people are also desperately required by us, but obviously they would have to be designed to meet our particular needs.
Try it at home?
We do have some powerful stand-up comics and satirists but we need more and more of humour that does more than raise a few laughs. Equally importantly, we need those performances, skits and other forms to cross boundaries and to be seen in different contexts outside the safe zones of English-based channels, websites and the echo-chambers of our social media networks. Imagine, then, someone asking a famously multi-lingual Cabinet Minister how she enjoys lying in five different languages, or whether on his next fancy suit Narendra Modi will have embroidered in gold thread the words ‘fakir-fakir-fakir’ instead of his name. Imagine someone having the courage to make fun of the Ambanis, Adanis, Birlas and Tatas the way the American comics take on the Koch brothers and other American oligarchs. Imagine Indian satirists and comics regularly lampooning absurd religious proclamations, or even famous figures from history. Finally, imagine all this happening without the people in power or their jumped up chamchas igniting with outrage, threatening rape and murder and misusing court cases and FIRs and bans on the people making the jokes. Watching Michelle Wolf I realised we have a long way to go before we can even approach the kind of free speech Americans can take for granted in the darkest of times.
