Off The Cuff: A wry look at life

Humour, as philosophers, social historians, political commentators and, yes, even humorists keep telling us, is an indispensable safety valve. Witness the film, Divine Intervention, presented at Cannes by Elia Suleiman, a courageous Palestinian director of rare vintage, who chose to depict the horror sweeping his nation on a humorous platform.

In oppressive times, especially, a sense of humour has helped societies cope with the vicissitudes of outrageous fortune or downright outrageous behaviour by their so-called leaders.In Sri Lanka, my tiny patch on the planet, humour sometimes is more than a laughing matter. The island'snearly 19 million people have long relied on their home-grown humour to see them through rough times, both short and long.

But given the Sri Lankans' predilection for a good laugh, they come up with jokes, generally levelled at politicians, even when they do well on their watch. It is no secret that at least one Sri Lankan president, the late Ranasinghe Premadasa, used to advise his party cadres to listen to the jokes doing the rounds at village markets, urban watering holes, campuses et al.It was his way of reading the popular mind because most of the jokes had a political sting in the punchline.

Premadasa, who won encomiums at the UN for his islandwide housing programme, preferred to use his initial, R, rather than his first name.Known for his fondness for a clean environment and neat cities, he also oversaw the creation, improvement and maintenance of scores of roundabouts in Colombo and its suburbs and other major towns.While welcoming the feel-good factor of a neat city or town, Sri Lankans just couldn't resist the opportunity to come up with a joke at their leader's expense. Hence the inevitable label:'Roundabout' Premadasa.

Premadasa's predecessor, the formidable Junius Richard Jayewardene, was a champion of the free market. Even as he won well-deserved plaudits at home and abroad for activating a game plan that brought his nation an unprecedented era of economic growth, he also made many enemies among the labour unions with whom he showed little patience.

A joke this spawned goes like this....A diehard leftist, who had lost his job in a state corporation following a strike which the Jayewardene regime deemed illegal, decides to seek revenge.With his fellow tipplers egging him on, he grabs a carver from the watering hole and rushes out to 'give the works', as Lankans are fond of saying, to Jayewardene. A couple of hours later, a dejected would-be assassin walks slowly back to the tipplers, the knife hanging limply by his side. What happened, did you get him?, they ask.

How the hell could I hang around so long, he yells...there was such a long queue of fellows with knives and axes waiting to get close to him! Another joke that has been doing the rounds for as long as your reporter can remember, concerns Sri Lanka's firebrand socialists of yore.

They were known for their slick getaways whenever things got ugly at a rally or meeting with stones and other ready-to-hand missiles appearing as if by magic. And whenever they couldn't get away, they hid in plain sight - given their uncanny ability to be at a safe distance from the frontline action.

Is it any wonder that this particular joke runs thus: Sri Lanka's leftist leaders are known for their pledge to fight to the last drop of their workers' blood! Also, as a very close kinsman used to write...in Sri Lanka, the leftist revolution has been negotiating the corner for many decades - some corner! As I said, sometimes it is more than a laughing matter...