Columns

One sometimes wonders who is teaching whom and who is learning from whom. This is no joke. There are too many jokers already on the streets, and now the streets are becoming overcrowded with defeated and decayed politicians taking to them and shoving the legitimate comedian occupants from their abodes.

Before long it will get worse. After all, we have been promised “system change”, and what better change is there than throwing a few carping commentators who can sum up governments on the make with a constant sense of humour behind bars?

It is far easier than trying to develop a sense of humour, which will need time till retirement, especially if one is going to chase gangsters and other unwanted dregs of society all over the world.

The result of all this, I am afraid, is that genuine comics are evicted from where they once made a living and driven into some hellhole where Donald Trump’s scattered moral guardians grab any stand-up comedian, construing him as guilty of violating human rights which he had heard of only a week earlier at the wall separating Mexico.

What caused this journey far afield from the usual forays into crazy diplomacy and other painstaking areas of moral turpitude is what I accidentally picked up from London’s “The Spectator” magazine while seeking some tantalising phrases and repartee from another unending political talker named Nigel Farage, who was heading for Trump country.

His regular intrusions into British and other political idiosyncrasies and digs are enough for a week’s laughter—that is, without encroaching into the Sri Lankan contributions gathered in Thalif Deen’s expanding book of jokes that should be preserved for posterity.

But my immediate concern is that Sinhala comedy is being erased, and its authors are worthy contributors to Sinhala literature, including the unforgiveable impromptu baila, like in the days long ago when Radio Ceylon entertained us with programmes of Sinhala folk and other music and baila.

Not that Sri Lanka does not turn on enough laughter when our bureaucracy and political hangers-on are let loose in the United Nation’s surroundings, as my dear friend and confrere Thalif Deen, who has kept surveillance of what goes on there for the last 40 years, would tell you, given half a chance to reach for his voluminous collections.

I would bet a big bag of juicy red onions from Jaffna, which President AKD must surely have savoured during his recent sojourn to the north, for a tonne of contaminated fertiliser available to struggling farmers that, right now, Dino (as we always called Thalif Deen) is smacking his lips and waiting—and waiting and waiting.

Actually, he is waiting eagerly for the new batch of homegrown experts to offload their intellectual weight at the doorsteps of the UN—be it in New York or in Geneva—so that he can expand his collection.

But jokes apart, making jokes in a moment of jest is becoming a serious thing. I wonder how many remember that two years ago one of Sri Lanka’s stand-up woman comedians was hauled to court because the highly motivated police oozing with overgrown moral fibres probably thought they were better comedians than the woman they arrested as being guilty of blasphemy.

With international human rights laws outrageously amended at home, young comedian Natasha Edirisooriya was jailed, still fighting against what rights activists called emblematic of Colombo’s use of blasphemy laws.

Of course, that is not all that is employed to stifle the democratic right of people to free speech and individual freedoms. If I do not repeat what Natasha Edirisooriya said, it is not because what started as a joke ended as something deadly serious in the hands of law enforcers, since one never knows what 5-star chamber is awaiting mistaken comedians.

After 39 days spent behind bars, the Attorney-General had to finally intervene in court to say there is no case to be heard against Natasha and withdraw it.

But Sri Lankan students of misplaced justice and misused laws would know that Natasha’s case is not the only one in recent years where the law has been waived to bury a person’s right to free speech, even if it happens to be the right to express thoughts and ideas as tragedy or comedy, in prose or verse. Humour and jest have sent other Sri Lankan writers, poets and comedians to jail because some believed—and rightly too—they had a right to exercise that freedom.

What is unacceptable and intolerable, however, is that we might still be heading for the worst while Western and other liberal countries enjoyed their far more lax socio-cultural environment. But that too is dying, and today we find even those countries that provided more freedom are becoming more constrained. They now fear to say in public what they would have said previously, under tightening moral censorship that is spreading like a cancer, as we noticed the other day.

This is what immediately came to mind when I first read of Natasha’s ridiculous arrest and now the silly arrest of the Irish comedian Graham Linehan last week at Heathrow Airport on his return from Arizona.

The two incidents are similar in more than one sense. That is what made me ask right at the beginning who is learning from whom. Natasha was stopped at the BIA when she was about to leave the country.

Last week Irish writer and comedian Graham Linehan was arrested by five armed British police at Heathrow Airport when he landed there on his return from Arizona. It seems an airport is a dangerous place for jokers; they never find the nationality.

Apart from any joke that Linehan might have cracked on Twitter about transgender persons, which the police seem to construe as guilty of racial insults, the bigger joke was the conduct of the police.

Those who live in London or those acquainted with the city know only too well that armed British police are hardly seen on the streets unless they are called on an emergency such as a terrorist alert or a serious threat.

Try to rouse a policeman to come and investigate house burglaries, fisticuffs and maybe stabbings; it would cause no surprise if some officers claim it is outside their purview.

Yet armed police are available to arrest those who exercise their right to a sense of humour.

Linehan’s arrest naturally raised public ire with the Metropolitan Police Chief, who, while defending police action, called on the government to “change or clarify the law”.

Health Minister West Streeting cracked back at the police, saying that the government needed to look at the relevant legislation, adding that ministers “want the police to focus on policing the streets rather than tweets…”

The question of the law has been at the very heart of public and legal concerns in recent years when governments meddled around in drafting and amending laws to make them amenable to their needs. As a result, many new laws were twisted into the unbelievable, detrimental to the people in the exercise of their legitimate rights.

It will surprise some concerned people, they say, if Sri Lanka continues to tamper with laws in the pursuit of their interest, killing some of the freedoms the country has managed so far to cling to.

What if some day the Minister of Mass Media, who is also said to be overseeing our health, passes a law making it compulsory to wear a face mask outside home? No, not to cover one’s nose. Just your mouth.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was Assistant Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later, he was Deputy Chief-of-Mission in Bangkok and Deputy High Commissioner in London.)